Communist China's Foreign Policy in the Early

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MILITARY-DIPLOMATIC ADVENTURISM: COMMUNIST CHINA’S FOREIGN

POLICY IN THE EARLY STAGE OF THE KOREAN WAR (1950-1951)

Wenrui Zhong

Thesis Prepared for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS

August 2013

APPROVED:

Harold Tanner, Major Professor Geoffrey Wawro, Committee Member Olga Velikanova, Committee Member Richard McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Zhong, Wenrui. Military-Diplomatic Adventurism: Communist China’s Foreign Policy in the Early Stage of the Korean War (1950-1951). Master of Arts (History), May 2013, 159 pp.,

1 figure, bibliography, 73 titles.

The thesis studies the relations of Communist China’s foreign policy and its military offensives in the battlefield in Korean Peninsula in late 1950 and early 1951, an important topic that has yet received little academic attention. As original research, this thesis cites extensively from newly declassified Soviet and Chinese archives, as well as American and UN sources. This paper finds that an adventurism dominated the thinking and decision-making of Communist leaders in Beijing and Moscow, who seriously underestimated the military capabilities and diplomatic leverages of the US-led West. The origin of this adventurism, this paper argues, lays in the CCP’s civil war experience with their Nationalist adversaries, which featured a preference of mobile warfare over positional warfare, and an opportunist attitude on cease-fire. This adventurism ended only when Communist front line came to the verge of collapse in June 1951.

Wenrui Zhong

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My research interest lies in the history of Communist Chinese Party (CCP), especially its

foreign relations. Professor Tanner allowed me to write a thesis on CCP’s diplomatic behavior

in Korean War, although UNT History program is more prepared in military history than

diplomatic history. In this regard, I am grateful to his approval of my proposal. More

importantly, he provided vigorous and extremely helpful advice and suggestions to my drafts in

aspects of reorganizing the structure, adding new sections, citing additional sources, using more

accurate terms, as well as rectifying language errors such as sentence structure. Without his

professional and devoted guidance, this thesis would not have achieved the current level of

accomplishment. Two other committee members also provided important advice to my paper.

Professor Wawro suggested me to extend my research to the current international controversies in South China Sea, in order to see if CCP’s diplomatic thinking in early Korean War (and in a broader sense, Chinese Exceptionalism) still plays a significant role in the current Beijing leadership’s decision-making process. Professor Velikanova suggested to keep a closer eye to the factors that shaped the Communist doctrines in its diplomacy, such as personality, and cultural influence. To all these suggestions, I express my deepest thanks and believe that they would be invaluable in my future study and research.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... vii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1 Literature Review...... 3 1.2 The Mis-learned Lessons of China's Civil Car: CCP’s Mentality on Cease-fire ...17 1.3 The Sources of Military Adventurism ...... 28 1.4 A New Start: PRC’s Diplomatic Doctrines and Foreign Policy ...... 36 1.4.1 General-Ambassadors: the Dismissal of Nationalist Diplomats ...... 37 1.4.2 Diplomacy as a Struggle ...... 40 1.4.3 Split with the West ...... 42 1.4.4 Lean to One Side: Sino-Soviet Alliance ...... 44

CHAPTER 2 WU XIUQUAN’S MISSION TO THE UN ...... 47 2.1 Korean War: the Turning Point...... 47 2.2 Motivation of the Delegation ...... 53 2.3 Preparation and Departure ...... 56 2.4 Arrival ...... 58 2.5 UNSC Debates ...... 59 2.6 Impacts ...... 65 2.7 Cease-fire Arrangement: Private Interactions ...... 68 2.8 Calculations of Moscow and Beijing on the War ...... 72 2.9 American-British Summit ...... 75 2.10 The End of Wu Mission ...... 77 2.11 A Review of the Mission ...... 81

CHAPTER 3 THE CEASE-FIRE INITIATIVES AND THE AGGRESSOR RESOLUTION ....86 3.1 The UN Resolution of December 13: UN Cease-fire Group ...... 86 3.2 Zhou’s Reply ...... 90 3.3 The Role of India as a Mediator of Cease-fire ...... 92 3.4 The Arab-Asian Group ...... 94 3.5 The CCP’s Assessment of Britain’s Attitude...... 96 3.6 Assessments from the Battlefield Commander: Marshal Peng Dehuai’s Perspective ...... 99 3.7 The Five-Principle Plan ...... 106 3.8 The Aggressor Resolution...... 116 3.9 The Impact and Implications of the Aggressor Resolution ...... 127 3.10 Communist Willingness for a Cease-fire ...... 130

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION...... 142 4.1 The Immaturity of the PRC’s Diplomatic System ...... 142 4.2 Military Adventurism...... 144 4.3 Diplomatic Adventurism ...... 146

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 155

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

1. CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Cease-fire Prediction Model ...... 28

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CCP Chinese Communist Party

CCPCC Chinese Communist Party Central Committee

CINCUNC Commander-in-Chief, United Nations Command

CKS Chiang Kai-shek or Jiang Jieshi

CPV Chinese People's Volunteers Army

DMZ Demilitarized Zone

DPRK Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)

FRUS Foreign Relations of United States

KMT Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party)

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NSC National Security Council (US)

PLA People's Liberation Army (People's Republic of China)

POW Prisoner of War

PRC People's Republic of China

ROC Republic of China

ROK Republic of Korea (South Korea)

UN United Nations

UNC United Nations Command

US United States

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis studies the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) foreign policy and its UN diplomacy in the early period of Korean War from the outbreak in June 1950 to July 1951, when both sides finally agreed to start the truce negotiation after eight months of serious fighting and failed mediation efforts. The process of the decision-making of Communist China’s leadership, as well as the major events and figures of this process are examined and its significance and impact would be analyzed, especially the PRC’s UN delegation in November and December,

1950, the UN cease-fire mediation and debates in the following two months, and the General

Assembly Resolution of February 1, 1951, in which the PRC was condemned as conducting aggression in Korea. Although it is necessary to address the context and process of Truman’s administration in making their China policy (such as, domestic political pressure, limited war, and vision of Kremlin’s world expansionism), the bulk of this study is focused on Communist

Chinese side to analyze Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s perceptions and evaluations of their challenges, problems, strengths, and diplomatic strategy and policies in the context of Korean

War as part of the global conflict of East and West (from the Chinese perspective, between the socialist camp and American imperialism).

By focusing on CCP diplomacy with regard to the Korean War, the thesis shows that both

Wu Xiuquan's mission to the UN and Bejing’s handling of the cease-fire proposals and the aggressor resolution were badly handled. Special attention are paid to the inaccuracy of Mao and

Zhou's assessments of the battlefield situation, the inaccuracy of their assessments of the international political and diplomatic situations. The study argues two points. First, the military adventurism of Mao and Stalin dominated their command of Communist forces: this adventurism

led to the serious setbacks of Communist armies in May and June 1951. Second, this

adventurism, plus the immaturity of PRC's diplomatic apparatus, led to a series of foreign-policy miscalculations which clearly permeated the whole process of Communist diplomacy in this period. This immaturity and adventurism contributed to the passage of an aggressor resolution in

UN condemning PRC and the following economic sanctions which lasted for than two decades, as well as to the indefinite suspension of PRC's UN representation. It was also a factor in the process that led to the U.S. Navy’s neutralization of the Taiwan Straits.

At a deeper and more theoretical level, this paper mainly addresses three big questions.

First, what were the structure and mechanism of the PRC’s diplomatic apparatus and the ways of behavior of its diplomats in its early years, and what implications/predictive values can we draw for analyzing and explaining PRC diplomacy in later periods? Second, how did Chinese nationalism (manifest in such concepts as, Sino-centrism, the mandate of heaven, the memories of the tributary system and the idea of China’s century of humiliation) influenced the PRC’s communist ideology and the proletarian internationalism embodied in its foreign policy? Third, how was the CCP’s United Front strategy practiced and tested in world arenas like UN Security

Council and General Assembly, and what lessons and implications can be drawn for analyzing the subsequent development of the PRC’s Third World grand strategy?

By the use of newly available Chinese and Russian government archives, this paper observes the diplomacy of this period from two perspectives, both of which are only be possible with the availability of these declassified sources. The first is the Soviet-China alliance in their cooperation in United Nations. Particular attention are paid to the role and status of Stalin and his government in alliance, to what degree Chinese foreign policy and diplomatic tactics were under the direct influence of Kremlin, and if so, what motivation and incentives spurred Chinese

willingness to follow the Kremlin in particular, were there ideological and historical, as well as

material factors in play?

The second perspective is the relationship of the military assessments and diplomatic

policy on the Communist side. Although military operations and diplomacy were understandably

correlated in the war environment, the relations between the two during the Korean War on

Communist side are yet to be fully studied because of the scarcity of primary sources. With the

aid of newly available sources, this paper describe how Mao’s assessments of CPV (Chinese

People’s Volunteers, the formal name of Chinese troops sent to Korean) combat strength and

chances of driving UN forces out of the Korean peninsula influenced Communist foreign policy

in aspects such as the assessment of diplomatic challenges and chances, perceptions of the peace

initiatives, and calculations of the cease-fire and peace negotiation.

This thesis is based on primary sources including various types of government documents, such as meeting records, reports, policy statements, official announcements, treaties, agreements, resolutions, and correspondence. In addition, memoirs and secondary sources are also be used.

1.1 Literature Review

Although some well-grounded studies have been published about US-China relation in

Korean War, in most cases, the focus either falls on China’s decision to enter the war in October

1950, or on the Kaesong-Panmunjom truce talks beginning in July 1953. Relatively little work has been done on the period from October 1950 to June 1951; to the best of my knowledge, there is no scholarship focusing explicitly on the PRC’s first UN delegation and the following intensive and explosive UN debates . Nonetheless, this period deserves our attention due to its

significance in PRC foreign relations with the West, and the geo-politics of the Far East. The

failure of Wu’s mission and the following UN cease-fire debates escalated CCP’s hostility toward the United Nations and perpetuated its confrontational policy toward the United States.

Being excluded from UN, and labeled as the aggressor, also contributed to the consolidation of the PRC’s alliance with Soviet Union and its support of North Korean and North Vietnamese regimes, which in turn changed the geo-politics of the Far East.

As for the secondary sources, in his ground-breaking book, China Crosses the Yalu,

Allen Whiting analyzes factors that led to the CCP leadership’s decision to intervene in the war.1

After examining the structure of Communist Party and its main problems, Whiting argues that

the external factor, namely, influence from Moscow, was a determining factor, or at least a major

contributing factor in Beijing’s decision into the War, although he admits that the lack of “firm

evidence” bearing on key Sino-Soviet decisions hinders the validity of his conclusion.2 This conclusion implies that Communist bloc was a monolithic entity, and that Communist China was a Soviet satellite in Far East. As for the scope, this book only covers the six months of the War from June to November, 1951, and hence largely falls out the scope of this thesis, yet Whiting’s study is still helpful in providing a frame of reference in researching CCP statements and behaviors in foreign policy in its incipient years.

Whiting characterized of the Chinese Communist Party as a band of revolutionaries who had “xenophobic attitudes with expansionist tendencies.”3 Although he has been widely

criticized on this score, this study finds that his generalization is still to some extent valid and

useful in explaining PRC’s diplomatic behavior in its early years, behavior including the

1 Allen S.Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (New York: MacMillan, 1960). 2 Ibid., pp.152-154. 3 Ibid., 2.

expulsion of foreigners, prosecutions of missionaries, the open proclamation of China’s support

for violent revolution in Third World countries, the Asian Monroe doctrine, and the hatred of

foreignness in its propaganda. Concurring with Whiting, this study finds that an aggressiveness,

to some extent recklessness, characterized the PRC’s foreign policy from late 1950 to mid 1951

in such issues as the UN debates and the cease-fire and peace negotiations.

The main problem of Whiting’s decades old book is the serious inadequacy of the sources,

which inevitably meant that many of his conclusions could only be established on a shaky basis

or were simply speculations. Writing in early 1960s, he could only rely on open print sources of

mainland China and the Soviet Union, which were not only limited in number, but also low

quality and low accuracy since most of them were simply propaganda materials. Whiting showed

great rigor and insight in his writing, and his framework of reference of PRC foreign policy is

still valuable even today, but the scant and doubtful sources he cites are detrimental to his

arguments. Only fifty years later, with the fall of Soviet Union and the dramatic changes of PRC,

thanks to the declassifying and publication of Soviet and Chinese archival materials, could a

thorough examination of the decision making process of the Soviet-Chinese communist

leaderships in those critical months be possible. And that is the purpose of this study.

Whiting’s conclusion is strongly challenged by Chen Jian and other scholars. In his book,

China's Road to the Korean War, Chen examines how the PRC leadership made their decision and the factors/reasons behind it.4 He finds that the CCP followed three guiding rationales,

namely, “the party's revolutionary nationalism, its sense of responsibility toward an Asian-wide

or worldwide revolution, and its determination to maintain the inner dynamics of the Chinese

4 Chen Jian, China's road to the Korean War: the making of the Sino-American confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

revolution” .5 He concludes that “there was little possibility that China’s entrance into the

Korean War could have been averted.”6 Similar with Whiting, however, Chen’s study does not

cover the following months when UN debates became increasingly important in the overall

conflict.

By focusing on ideological and cultural factors, Chen shows an important dimension of

CCP’s decision making in its foreign policy, yet he does not pay enough attention to Kremlin’s

influence under the framework of Party to Party relations and the Sino-Soviet alliance, even

though he mentions it in the second rationale of his formula. Through the use of Russian as well

as Chinese sources, my thesis tries to address that issue by pointing out the Stalin’s role in the

decision making process seems undeniable, if not dominant.

William Stueck’s Korean War: an International History, is the most detailed, well- grounded diplomatic history of the Korean War published in recent years.7 Using of recently

available materials from seven countries, plus the archives of the United Nations, the Stueck

presents a detailed narrative of the diplomacy of the conflict as well as a broad assessment of its

critical role in the Cold War. He shows events and processes from the breakout of the War, to the

Chinese intervention and the mediation efforts of neutral countries, to the twists and turns of

cease-fire negations, to the final armistice agreement signed in July 1953. The focus is put on the

arena of United Nations as an institutional framework, where according to the Stueck, the neutral

and less powerful countries, such as India, were able to restrain the aggressive tendencies of the

United States. Stueck argues that their efforts were partly successful in curbing American

5 Ibid., pp.213-214. 6 Ibid., 5. 7 William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

adventurism and thus helping to prevent the occurrence of an even more destructive global

conflict.

Stueck’s survey is very helpful in terms of sources and historical narrative. He cites

Indian and British sources to show in great detail the Indian-British cooperation in the peace

initiatives and truce negotiations. Although it is well-known that India played an active role in

the mediation process, the motivation behind which remained a puzzle which only becomes clear

through Stueck’s work and in the relevant Chinese archives. The close cooperation between New

Delhi and London on issues of Korean war, as described by Stueck, corroborates Zhou Enlai’s

claim (seen in the Chinese documents) that India was a tool or proxy of Britain.

In addition to Stueck, Thomas Christensen is another scholar who has conducted in-depth

research on the diplomacy of the Korean War8. His studies on the “coercive diplomacy” and

“grand strategy” are of special value. The concept of coercive diplomacy is derived from

deterrence theories, and addresses how to use threats and assurances to manage adversaries to

take actions to the benefits of the initiator. Christensen provides a set of conceptual tools for

analyzing this diplomacy, such as “credibility of threat,” “deterrent warning,” “credible signal,”

and “the credibility of near-term threats and the credibility of long-term assurances that the threats are conditional on the target's behavior.”9 He then applies them to a review of two failed

attempts of coercive diplomacy: Beijing’s failure to deter Washington from crossing the 38th

parallel in October 1950, and Washington’s failure in dissuading Beijing from entering into the

8 See his two monographs and one journal article, Useful adversaries: grand strategy, domestic mobilization, and Sino-American conflict, 1947-1958 (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press,1996); Worse than a Monolith : Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011); “Threats, Assurances, and the Last Chance for Peace: the Lessons of Mao's Korean War Telegrams”, International Security (Vol. 17, No. 1, Summer, 1992), pp.122-154. 9 Christensen, Worse than a Monolith, 94.

war. 10 His discussions of the diplomatic events, therefore, are more theoretical with more explanatory power. Yet he does not cover the months in late 1950 and early 1951, a period also saw the use of such coercive diplomacy in both sides. With the introduction of the concept of

“grand strategy" into the discussion of foreign policy, Christensen tries to explain the diplomatic behavior of governments by reference to domestic politics as well as external challenges. As he sees it, only by taking into account Mao’s or Truman’s intentions for massive domestic mobilization campaigns for either consolidating Communist rule or strengthening the Cold War stance, can we achieve a more satisfactory explanation of their aggressive foreign policies, which from the pure professional diplomatic perspective seem reckless and unwise. With this two-level analysis, he further establishes a model for this mobilization strategy.11 He applies the approach to analyze Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases, we see that leaders used an extension of short-term conflict in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self- strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate into larger scale conflicts, as in the case of Korea because of the domestic considerations and the failed of coercive diplomacy.

With this approach, Christensen participates into the long-held debate: how to explain the entry of Communist China into the Korean War? Was there any “lost chance” that both Beijing and Washington could have taken to avoid this war? By analyzing the newly available Chinese and Soviet archives, he concludes that there was a lost chance in American China policy in early

1950. According to Christensen, if a working relationship had been established between Beijing

10 Ibid., Chapter 3. 11 Christensen, Useful Adversaries, 13

and Washington in early 1950, in which the policies of recognition of Beijing and abandonment

of Chiang Kai-shek had been adopted, then the escalation of the Korean War in fall 1950 would

have been avoided Thus he sees “a causal link between two key American China policies of

1949-50-nonrecognition of Beijing and the blocking of the Taiwan Straits--and the disastrous

escalation of the Korean War that occurred when China crossed the Yalu in the fall of 1950.”12

The domestic political considerations (grand strategy), however, made it impossible for leaders

in White House to adopt such policy option. That is why President Truman or John Dulles

impatiently shrugged off any more practical proposals by professional diplomats such as George

Kennan, who advocated an engagement policy toward the new Communist regime in China.

Particularly relevant to this study is Christensen’s well-informed and insightful analysis of Mao’s

attitudes on US in the early stages of the Korean War, which he derives from an examination of

recently published Mao manuscripts. Another outstanding achievement of Christensen’s studies

lies in his examination of the newly declassified telegrams of Mao to Peng Dehuai and Joseph

Stalin, which is of great quality and accuracy.13 Since Christensen’s work was published in early

1990s, more telegrams have become available in Zhou’s manuscripts and in the Soviet archives.

Michael Hunt’s book, The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy, offers a fresh

look to the historical origins of the PRC’s foreign policy as revealed in newly available Chinese-

language sources, which he found during his stay in Beijing in 1989.14 After tracing traditional

Chinese legacies on strategic thinking and statecraft, Hunt then provides a detailed discussion of how Chinese, especially, Communists, dealt with the foreign challenges from the late Qing

12 Ibid., 138 13 Christensen, “the Lessons of Mao's Korean War Telegrams”, International Security.

14 Michael H.Hung, The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (New York, NY:

Columbia University Press, 1996).

period to the early 1950s. He argues that Marxism –Leninism alone was not enough to explain

CCP’s diplomatic behavior and decision making. Instead, he pays special attention of how Mao

ascended to the position as the supreme authority of Communist foreign policy. Mao’s

personality, he argues, was another key factor in forming the pattern of PRC’s diplomacy. As a

result of the combination of these factors, he argues that “the most notable feature of the CCP's

handling of the imperialists was self-interested adventurism.” 15 This term is provocative, and it

aroused some criticisms, mainly from Chinese scholars.16 Yet his study finds that “adventurism”

is a useful conceptual tool in explaining the CCP’s behavior at least during the early months of

Korean War. In sections on Korean War, Hunt once again uses this term in explaining Mao’s

decision making in late 1950, observing that “Mao in effect fell victim to military

adventurism.”17 However, although he is insightful in tracing the origin of Mao’s military command mistakes, Hunt seldom touches upon the CCP’s foreign policy during the Korean War.

Moreover, Hunt seems to overemphasize Mao’s role in the whole diplomatic history of CCP, and as a result, he seldom mentions the role of Zhou Enlai in PRC’s foreign policy. As we will see,

Zhou actually assumed a much more active and independent role than the “chief lieutenant” status that Hunt assigns to him.18

Of the Chinese scholarship on Korean War, Yao Xu’s From Yalu River to Panmunjom

stands out in that it includes extensive footnotes in citing Chinese-language sources.19 Some of

Yao’s sources are internal publications; others are Chinese translations of American or Soviet

15 Ibid., 214 16 For example, see Xiaobo Hu’s review of this book in the American Political Science Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), p. 235. 17 Hung, Genesis, 191. 18 Ibid., 265. 19 Yao, Xu. Cong yao lu jiang dao bang men dian: wei da de kang mei yuan chao zhan zheng (From Yalu River to Panmunjom: the Great War to Resist America and Aid Korea 从鸭绿江到板门店：伟大抗美援朝战争) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1985).

materials. Equally important, although the book largely follows the interpretive constraints dictated by the PRC’s official ideology, the author’s analysis nevertheless, is fresh and informative in regard to various events and processes. For example, he candidly admits that

Communist crossing of the 38th Parallel in late December 1950 was a haste decision, as warned by Marshal Pengd Dehuai. He also revealed the massive losses of Communist forces in the Fifth

Campaign in Spring 1951.20 He also deals with the foreign policy of PRC in this period although his discussion in this regard is more conservative and thus remains within the Party line. 21

Another PRC publication, History of War to Resist America and Aid Korea, written under the collective authorship of History Research Department of PRC Military Science Academy, is the so far most detailed and informative history on Korean War.22 Of particular relevance are the chapters on the diplomatic dimension of the war which focus on Communist foreign policy.

Moreover, the book provides footnotes (albeit basic and inadequate), a rare practice in PRC until recently. Other than these qualities, the book is a typical Communist official history, in which the perspective, discussion, and use of materials are strictly confined to official ideology and political lines. The most serious problems in this book, as in other similar publications, are patriotism, ethno-centrism, the Marxist linear and progressive model of interpretation of the CCP and its leaders, as well as a reticence with regard to the relations of CCP and its “fraternal parties” in Soviet Union and North Korea. This led to the lack of any discussion of the Soviet

Union’s pivotal role in Communist China’s major policy making processes.

Regarding the primary sources written in English, the most relevant ones include US

Foreign Relations of United States (FRUS), the New York Times, and the Proceeding Records of

20 Ibid., pp. 47-48, and pp. 72-77 21 Ibid., p.49, pp.51-52, p.58, pp.66-67, pp.77-79. 22 History Research Department of PRC Military Science Academy, Kang mei yuan chao zhan zheng shi (History of War to Resist America and Aid Korea 抗美援朝战争史) ( Beijing: Jun shi ke xue chu ban she, 2000), 3 vol.s.

United Nations in 1950 and 1951. Take FRUS as an example, the most related volumes are those

in the years of 1950 and 1951 in Far East regions, such as China, and Korea, which as whole

provides another extremely important and useful source other than Chinese and Russian sources

mentioned above. The transcripts of National Security Council meetings during 1950 and its

documents (such as NSC 68, NSC 101), the CIA’s report on Korean situations, the reports of

diplomats from United Nations, India, and Britain, President Truman’s papers, and so on, are

pivotal in understanding the decision making process and the strategic and tactical thinking of

American top officials. For example, the meeting records of the seven-day submit of President

Truman and British Prime Minister Attlee in early December 1950 proved to be invaluable in

tracing the American assessments and calculations in issues such as the degree of the threats of

Chinese Communists to US, American attitude on cease-fire, American policy in Taiwan and

China’s seat in UN. In addition, The New York Times provides a nearly exhausted coverage of

the events in UN and in Washington of those months with quality reports.

The Chinese primary sources on the PRC diplomacy in Korean War are mostly found in

the official publications on the posthumous communist leaders, which are published since late

1980s. The currently available publications that are most related this project are the

“manuscripts” of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the “chronicles” of Zhou Enali and Peng Dehuai,

as well as the “Selected Military Works” of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.23

23 Zhou Enlai, Jian guo yi lai zhou en lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Enlai since the Founding of PRC建国以来周恩来文稿) ( Beijing: Zhong yang wen xian chu banshe, 2008). Mao Zedong, Jian guo yi lai mao ze dong wen gao (Manuscripts of Mao Zedong since the Founding of PRC建国以来毛泽东文稿）(Beijing: zhong yang wen xian chu ban she, 1987).Li Ping, and Ma Zhisun eds. Zhou en lai nian pu (1949-1976) (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 周恩来年谱) (Beijing: Zhong yang wen xian chu ban she, 1997). Wang Yan ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life彭德怀年谱) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1998). Mao Zedong, Mao ze dong jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works of Mao Zedong 毛泽东军事文集), (Beijing: Jun shi ke xue chu ban she, 1993). Zhou Enlai, Zhou enlai wai jun shi wen xuan (Selected Military Works of Zhou Enali周恩来军事文选) (Beijing: Ren mi chu ban she , 1997).

The three volumes of Manuscripts of Zhou Enali since the Founding of PRC is the most

comprehensive collection published so far of official documents related to Zhou’s position as

China’s premier and foreign minister from the founding of the regime in October 1949 to the end

of 1950.24 This project was dominated by the government with the purpose of “commemorating

the110th birth anniversary of Comrade Zhou Enlai” as great proletariat revolutionary leader. The

nearly 1000 documents included in this collection include Zhou’s handwritten orders, directives,

proposals, typed speeches, statements, and other articles that he had revised and approved. Most

of these files are from recently declassified archives and published for the first time by Chinese

government., They show not only the details of Zhou’s work, but also the decision making

process, the mentality and the behavior modes of Communist China’s leadership in this critical

period of time. As a whole, this publication provides an invaluable source for scholars and

students in modern Chinese history, Cold War studies, and modern Far East international

relations.

Volume 1 includes Zhou’s papers from June 1949 to December 1949, which see how

Zhou provided a leading role in the founding process of People’s Republic. Volume 2 deals with

the first half of 1950, again most of the archives address the internal issues, yet we can

increasingly find papers about foreign affairs, such as China’s alliance with Soviet Union, the

controversies about the American diplomatic establishments and other American interests.

Volume 3 deals with the second half of 1950, where we see many articles deal with the Korean

War issues, such as China’s response to Korean war, the preparation of borderline garrison

troops, logistic issues, the coordination with Soviet Union, China’s diplomatic efforts with

24 Zhou Enlai, Jian guo yi lai zhou en lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Enlai since the Founding of PRC 建国以来周恩来文稿) ( Beijing: Zhong yang wen xian chu banshe, 2008), 3 vols.

United Nations (such as protests, warnings, requests, speeches, and so on), Chinese offensives

planning and preparation, America policy, and so on.

In this thesis, I make extensive use of this publication in citing Zhou’s internal directives,

policy proposals, memos, correspondents, and speeches in addressing the diplomatic as well as

military involvements of Chinese government in Korea War from the first six months of Korea

war from June to December in 1950. These materials are useful in revealing the Chinese

leadership’s calculations on such issues as cease-fire arrangements and peace initiatives in the

United Nations.

A second source, Mao’s thirteen-volume manuscripts, is the product of a huge official effort in publishing the late Mao Zedong’s documents in 1980s.25 It includes three types of files:

first, handwritten manuscripts, such as articles, directives, orders, outlines of speeches, and

correspondents, second, speeches and transcribed speeches that he had verified and approved,

third, other documents that he approved to publish in his name. According to the publisher, a

small portion of these files had been openly published before, a large portion had been circulated

within the Communist Party or within a small scope of readers within the Party, while others

had never been published.

As the supreme leader of Communist China for more than two decades, Mao’s played a

pivotal role in Korean War. He was directly involved and made all major decisions on Chinese

military intervention, diplomatic offensive, and its coordination with Moscow. The newly

published archives were an extremely important source in our understanding of issues such as the

war-time Communist decision making process, calculations of risks, assessment of battlefield situation, policy priorities, and the roles of Communist ideology and Chinese nationalism.

25 Mao Zedong, Jian guo yi lai mao ze dong wen gao (Manuscrips of Mao Zedong since the Founding of PRC 建国以来毛泽东文稿）(Beijing: zhong yang wen xian chu ban she, 1987), 13 vols.

That being said, we must take note of the fact that this is an official publication in a country where the government censorship is much stricter than in any Western countries such as

United States. The editors have filtered at least one key category of Mao’s papers, that is, the correspondence between him and Stalin and other Soviet leaders. As other studies show, a close alliance existed between Moscow and Beijing throughout the Korean War. Mao and Zhou wrote to Stalin on a regular basis to discuss of issues such as military aid, the battlefield situation, and cease-fire negotiations. Stalin’s advice and promises often proved to be pivotal in Beijing’s decisions. Hence, inasmuch as it lacks of this type of document, this publication must be used cautiously together with other complementary sources, such as declassified Soviet archives in order to gain a whole picture of the events and thinking involved.

In addition to these government publications, in recent years, a sharply different type of publishing efforts has gained momentum, the target of which are former Soviet archives, which became available after the fall of Soviet Union in 1991. They are non-official scholarly efforts by

Chinese historians, who financed their own field trips to Russia to reach these formerly extremely sensitive classified archives in the shelves of the various institutes. Sometimes they needed pay high costs to photocopy these files. The focus of their interests is the archives that are directly related to China’s revolution, as well as Sino-Soviet relations.

Among these efforts, Shen Zhihua’s Korean War: Declassified Archives from Russian

Archival Institutes is the most relevant to this thesis. This is a collection of more than 700 declassified documents from the former Soviet archives regarding Korean War. These were top secret documents of Soviet Communist Party and Soviet government, inaccessible to outside

world until the fall of Soviet Union.26 The Chinese author, who is a historian and successful

businessman, took advantage of the chaos in archival management in the following years in

order to do field research in the Russian archival institute. Most of these archival documents

were directly excavated from the shelves by Shen and his assistants, free from any selecting and

filtering process on the part of the Russian government. Therefore, these archives as a whole

provide a more a complete source for the study of Soviet involvement of the Korean War. This

advantage is significant if we compare the two sources that have been discussed above, because

the government censorship indeed is a grave impediment for any serious scholarship in

international political history.

The archives are arranged chronologically from early in December 1945 when Soviet

forces took over the northern part of the peninsula to 1954, when the post-war political

settlement negation began in Geneva. Many archives were Soviet internal reports of the Korean

situation, and ensuring Soviet policies and orders. The most interesting are telegrams between

Stalin and Chinese leaders, including assessments of military and diplomatic situations and the

planning, enforcement, and reviews of their military and diplomatic policies. These include some

extremely important Chinese telegrams signed by Mao, Zhou, or Peng Dehuai during those

months, which have been filtered by Communist China’s censors in the extant PRC publications,

such as Zhou’s proposal to Stalin about PRC’s response to UN peace offer in December 1950

and the complete text of Peng’s assessments of the battlefield situation in spring 1951.

26 Shen, Zhihua 沈志华, Chao xian zhan zheng: e guo dang an guan jie mi dang an (Korean War: Declassified Archives from Russian Archival Institutes 朝鲜战争：俄国档案馆解密档案) (Taipei: Zhong yang yan jiu yuan jin dai yan jiu suo, 2003), 3 vols..

These declassified secret files, indicate that a very close relationship existed between

Moscow and Beijing in the Korean War. Stalin played the role of supreme leader of the

Communist Bloc, and for the most part, Chinese counterparts followed his suggestions.

1.2 The Mis-learned Lessons of China's Civil Car: CCP’s Mentality on Cease-fire

In the process of cease-fire negotiations during the Korean War, the CCP frequently cited its prior experience of cease-fires during their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek, especially those mediated by US envoy General George Marshall in 1946, as the historical reason to justify its position and attitude on the cease-fire issue in the Korean context. Therefore, it is helpful to briefly review the CCP’s civil war experience in order to see what kind of experiences the

Communists had with cease-fires (particularly those in which the United States acted as a negotiator), what kinds of lessons the Communist Party may have drawn from those experiences, and what kind of mentalities or stereotypes the CCP leadership, particularly Zhou Enlai, may have been left with as a result.

The earliest and arguably the most desperate Communist cease-fire effort took place in late 1936 and 1937, when Communists found that they had lost the 10-year civil war to Chiang

Kai-shek’s KMT (Kuomintang or Nationalist Party), and the Communist Party and its forces were on the verge of collapse. At that point, the Communist forces had been decimated, declining from a high of 300 thousand soldiers to no more than 30 thousand, and were encircled in a barren area in remote Shaanxi province. Even worse, the number of soldiers that Mao felt comfortable with and confident to use was even less than 15 thousand. The Communists themselves further admitted that their networks and organizations in the KMT areas had been

destroyed “100%,” and those in their former “Soviet areas” by “90%.”27 From both declassified

KMT and CCP sources, as well as memoirs of important figures of that period, the signs of the

collapse of Chinese Soviet movement could be seen everywhere. Mao even planned to fight a

way out to Soviet controlled Outer-Mongolia with the remains of his forces.28 The reasons for

this collapse were many, but in addition to the commonly held reasons such as CCP’s internal

faction struggle, or the misguidance of Moscow, another more fundamental factor seemed to be

the somewhat incompatibility of Communism with China’s real situation and its historical-

cultural legacies. During those years, the radicalization of many Communist policies and

propaganda had scared away potential supporters and sympathizers. On the other hand, the

“feudal-capitalist” Chiang Kai-shek regime still had enough resources and popular support to be

able to suppressing its communist challengers.

Under this background, and in the context of an imminent full-scale Japanese invasion of

China, the Communists repeatedly sent cease-fire initiatives to KMT government, calling for the

formation of a United Front in dealing with Japanese threats. In December 1936, Communists

managed to send their good will to Chiang, who was surprisingly kidnapped by one of his

generals, Zhang Xueliang, a Manchuria warlord, in the city of Xi’an in Shannxi province. Zhang

was dispatched by Chiang to suppress Communist rebellion in Northwest China, yet Zhang had

secretly allied himself with Communists in hopes of avoiding the possible attrition of his own

forces. It is also possible that discontent with Chiang’s Japan policy, which was widely

perceived as an appeasement of Japanese expansionism in China, inspired feelings of patriotism

27 CCP Politburo, “Directive about the Study of the Article “Against the Adventurism in the United Front”, in Central Archival Institute 中央档案馆 ed., Zhong gong zhong yang kang ri min zu tong yi zhan xian wen jian xuan bian (CCP Central Committee Selected Documents of the National United Front in the War Resisting Japan, 中共中央抗日民族统一战线文件选编) (Beijing: Dang an chu ban she, 1985), vol. 3, 674. 28 Braun, Zhong guo ji shi (Memoirs of China Travel), p. 214. According to Otto, Mao’s plan was approved in a meeting of either Politburo or Military Committee in January 1936, yet later was abortive.

on Zhang’s part. Shortly after the thrill of the capture of Chiang, Communists became aware of

the fact that although they could have Chiang murdered, their current military inferiority and

lack of national support meant that they were in no way capable to repel the coming KMT

revenge offensive. In fact, the most urgent task of CCP was to how to survive the blows of the

KMT’s “annihilation campaigns,” rather than to defeat KMT in a foreseeable future. Therefore,

they were ready to make significant concessions (some even approaching surrender) to Chiang,

as long as they could continue to keep control of their forces (in Mao’s term, gun barrels), in

order to gain a breathing time and space to regroup and rejuvenate themselves. As a branch of

Comintern, CCP did not have power to make such fundamental policy change; instead, that

power was in the hands of Moscow leaders. Stalin played a decisive role in the whole process of

releasing Chiang from the arrest on December 25, 1936, and the accompanying the release of the

CCP’s proclamation of KMT-CCP cooperation, which was approved by Chiang and published

via the KMTnews agency on July 25, 1937. 29 The promises and concessions in this statement

were shocking and unconceivable indeed to any devoted Communist revolution believers.

Specifically, the document made four concessions to Chiang :

1). Mr. Sun Yet-sen’s Three People’s Principles are what today’s China most desires; the Party will like to devote itself in struggles for their ultimate realization

2). The cancellation of the armed rebellion policy and Sovietization policy, which are intended to overthrow the Nationalist regime, and the end of the policy of the armed confiscation of landlord’s land.

29 Many sources can corroborate that Stalin and Comintern played a decisive role in the whole process. Such as, in his memoir, Zhang Guotao(张国焘), then member of CCP politburo and political rival of Mao, mentioned that a directive drafted by Stalin from Moscow on December 13, 1936, vetoed CCP’s scheme to lure Zhang Xueliang to murder Chiang; instead, Stalin dictated a peaceful solution of the incident, which included the release of the Kidnapped Chiang, see Zhang Guotao 张国焘, Wo de hui yi (My Memoirs 我的回忆) (Beijing: Dong fang chu ban she, 1998), vol. 3, Pp.332-334. Edgar Snow, a well-known leftist journalist on Red China, has a similar description of how Moscow’s telegram had upset Mao, who was planning to give Chiang an open trial. See Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China (1936-1945) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2. Also, Zhou’s chronicle shows how anxiously both Zhou and Zhang Xueliang (who ironically was admitted to CCP as a secret member) waiting for directives from Moscow. See Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), December 17 and December 20, 1936.

3). The cancellation of the current Soviet governments, and instead the inauguration of the rule of democracy, in order to achieve the unification of national political power.

4). The cancellation of the title and unit names of Red Army, and reorganize it into be part of the National Revolution Army [the name of KMT forces], and put it under the command of the National Military Committee [Chiang Kai-shek as the generalissimo]….30

These commitments altogether seemed to amount to an unconditional surrender and

Chinese communists seemed to forsake all of their revolution values and goals, yet it was a

tactical retreat. CCP still fully controlled its forces although nominally they were under the

command of Chiang Kai-shek, and also it maintained its grip on its base areas. More importantly,

by these concessions, CCP regained a legal status as the second political party with its own

armed forces in China to conduct its activities, which was much needed for Communists to

alleviate the pressures from KMT and expand their influences. By the end of the War with

Japan in 1945, CCP controlled a much larger population, territories, as well as armed forces, than

what it had ten years ago. The newly gained power would inevitably be reflected in the

negotiation table. With more bargaining powers in hand, Communist negotiators now became

more confident and tough in their negotiations with Nationalists, and the earlier somewhat

humble or even submissive attitude was largely put to an end.

In the year of 1946, the Nationalists and Communists reached at least three cease-fire

agreements. In the January 10 arrangement, the cease-fire was largely non-conditional, although

it provided that KMT was allowed to continue to transfer its troops in Manchuria and to continue

30 CCP Central Committee, “Statement on the Cooperation of KMT and CCP”, in Central Archival Bureau ed., Tong yi zhan xian wen jian (Selected Documents of the United Front), vol. 3, 9. “一、孙中山先生的三民主义为中国今日之必需，本党愿为其彻底的实现而奋斗。二、取消一切推翻国民党政权的暴动政策，及赤化运动，停止以暴力没收地主土地的政策。三、取消现在的苏维埃政府，实行民权政治，以期全国政权之统一。四、取消红军名义及番号，改编为国民革命军，受国民政府军事委员会之统辖，并待命出动，担任抗日前线之职责”

its army regroup program in south of Yangtze River.31 The cease-fire was put in effect three

days later. It set up a system of three-man cease-fire teams, with the lead team being composed by representatives of both sides as well as General Marshall, to monitor the enforcement of the truce. All political issues, such as the nationalization of party armies, the establishment of a coalition government, and the formation of the new National Parliament, were to be dealt with by the coming sessions of the Political Consultative Conference. Official Communist Chinese histories admit that at the time of the agreement signed, Communist forces were at a

disadvantage compared to their Nationalist counterparts. In particular, in Manchuria, Lin Biao’s

forces needed time to strengthen their newly gained positions, to train recruits, and to mobilize

the local populace. Nationalist forces followed the agreement for slightly more than one month.

Beginning on February 29, they renewed their offensive in Manchuria. This breach became

convenient ammunition for Zhou’s attack on General Marshall’s objectivity in the mediation,

and the real purpose of his mission.

The second cease-fire agreement was reached on June 6, when Communist forces in

Manchuria were under the full pressure of the Nationalist army after it suffered horribly in the

Second Battle of Siping (or Sipingjie) in April-May. This truce was again signed without any

political pre-conditions attached. Once again, this cease-fire was short-lived for only a few

weeks in China Proper and three months in Manchuria, yet it proved extremely helpful for the

retreating Communist forces to regroup their units, adjust their tactics, and improve their

logistics. 32 In both cases, a cease-fire was much more needed for Communists than Nationalists

31 “Representatives of CCP and KMT Government Oder and Announcement on the Cessation of National Conflicts”, January 13, 1946, in Central Archival Institute ed., wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee), Vol.16 (1946-1947), Pp. 17-18 32 The ceasefire was originally for fifteen days. On 20 June, CKS agreed to extend it until the end of the month. Afterward, he turned his attention to operations inside the Great Wall. Thus, in practical terms, the ceasefire was held until August, when Nationalist troops initiated operations in western Liaoning, Rehe, and Chahar outside the

because the former was desperate for a halt of the latter’s offensives, so in fact the former did not

raise any political demands in these agreements.

The third mediation effort in 1946 saw a fundamental change in Communist policy in

conducting cease-fire negotiations. This time, the Communists adopted a more aggressive and

uncompromising attitude. The reasons for this change can be found in the Party’s assessments of

the overall situation, and its confidence in its newly gained superiority over the Nationalists. First

of all, the fact that the Communists had lost so much territory in Manchuria and China proper

had made it nearly impossible for them to continue to be flexible in this matter. On the other

hand, as the result of well-planned retreats (in spite of some quite serious setbacks), Communist

forces had succeeded in concentrating its formerly decentralized regiments and divisions into

field armies with unified command and logistical supports, and had begun to take inflict heavy

casualties in its encounters with the government forces. With its military power on the rise,

Communist war-time mobilization was also under way. A brutal land reform policy (suspended

in the eight-year war against Japanese invasion) was resumed in the countryside in order to mobilize poor peasants to support the war. Landlords as a class were wiped out and their properties were redistributed to peasants, who then were told by Communist cadres that if they wanted to retain their newly gained benefits, they had to support the new regime by joining the army or by other available means, because if they did not, the landlord-backed KMT would

likely return and take back what they lost. Women were also given (at least nominally) more

rights and powers in family and government as the evidence of communist “liberation

movement,” most of whom in turn became a formidable “new” force of that movement. As the

other side of the coin, the KMT’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. Communist propaganda

Great Wall. Only in October did Lin Biao's forces in the South Manchuria Base Area come under serious attack. So the ceasefire, for all practical purposes, gave Lin Biao around three months.

successfully demonized Chiang by attacking him as the initiator of the new civil war, which was

extremely unpopular among the urban residents. The deepening economic crisis of the KMT

areas, where the already economic and financial systems, bankrupted in the war against Japan

were unable support another war also contributed to rising popular resentment against the KMT.

In military terms, the vast newly gained territories turned out to be more a burden than a trophy

for Nationalist forces because of the need to garrison and defend these areas adsorbed a

significant portion of their sources. As a result, the increasingly decentralized KMT forces,

together with their inherent problems of corruption, faction struggle, poor command and tactics,

and the low morale among their poorly trained conscripts, found them increasingly unable to

combat the newly centralized Communist forces. As General Marshall pointed out, “the

Communists had lost cities but not armies and that it was not likely that they would lose their

armies, as they had no intention of making a stand or of fighting to a finish at any place.” 33

Therefore, the Communists abandoned their previous policy of pursuing an immediate, non-conditional cease-fire. The CCP’s Central Committee stated this policy change clearly in a directive to its delegation to Nanjing on October 4: “you should switch from the current position for a non-conditional cease-fire to the one that demands the restoration of the status quo on

January 13 in both territory and armed forces as the prerequisite. Were this condition not met, were there no discussions of all other issues.”34 Zhou then started to adopt a more aggressive line in his negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek. In response to a 10 day cease-fire offer in the strategic city of Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), brokered by General Marshall in October 2, Zhou demanded three conditions be met. These included the restoration of military status of January

13 in China proper, and that of June 7 in Manchuria. These conditions were in no way acceptable

33 Marshall’s Mission to China (Arlington: University Publications of America. Inc.,1976), vol. 1, p. 347. 34 Zhou en lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), October 4, 1946, p. 352

to Chiang, and actually Zhou rejected this cease-fire offer. Although Zhou’s new position

greatly upset Marshall, who repeatedly mentioned Zhou’s suspicion and distrust of his mediation,

Zhou’s action was directed by Mao, who designed this counter-proposal to Chiang and then after

Chiang’s expected rebuff, accused Chiang and Marshall of being responsible for the Civil War.35

This new policy was also applied to its propaganda. For the first time, CCP attacked these

cease-fire negotiations as a KMT plot. In a statement, the CCP’s spokesman Liao Chengzhi said,

“This cease-fire order has no difference whatsoever with earlier ones. It is not a so-called cease-

fire order actually, but instead an order of attack for an all-out war. Chinese people should never be fooled by it.”36 Zhou himself used this rhetoric many times. For instance, on November 8, in a telegram to CCP Central Committee, he said that the KMT’s talk of a cease-fire was a lie.37

During his mission, General Marshall observed the deep fears, distrusts and suspicions

were inherent in both sides, which was a key factor in explaining why Chinese civil were

impossible to be solved by any political negotiations.38 More importantly, Communists also

applied this mentality and attitude in viewing General Marshall’s mediation and US

government’s China policy. This attitude can be seen both in the their propaganda campaign and

in their negotiation policy. Marshall cited one of Mao’s press interviews in August as the

35 From beginning to end, Mao never took the peace negotiation between CCP and KMT as a feasible and sincere approach to solve China’s internal strife; instead, he took it as a conspiracy of Chiang and Americans to destroy Communists. His strategic goal in cease-fire and negotiations, therefore, was to accumulate popular supports for CCP rather than to solve any fundamental problems. For instance, in one of his directives in September 1946, he opened with saying, “Obviously US has order Marshall and Chiang Kai-shek to initiate a peace offense during their current all-out military offense. Therefore, our current non-conditional cease-fire becomes outdated…Our new slogan should be “American Troops out of China”, the purpose of which is to expose their peace scheme to Chinese people. ” See “CCPCC Directive on Initiating ‘American Troops Out of China’” Week Movement “, in Central Archival Institute ed., wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee), Vol.16 (1946-1947), Pp. 299-300. 36 Liao Chengzhi, “Statement on the ‘Cease-fire’ Announcement by KMT Regime on the Date of 8th”, in Liao Chengzhi, Liao cheng zhi wen ji (Selected Works of Liao Chengzhi 廖承志文集) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1990), vol. 1, p. 125. 37 Ibid., November 8, 1946, p. 356 38 Marshall’s Mission to China, vol. 1, p. 100.

evidence of the Communist attitude. As Marshall described it, Mao had said that “he doubted

that the United States could be said to have mediated in China, judging from the large scale aid

given to the National Government to enable the Generalissimo to launch a civil war; American

policy had strengthened the Generalissimo under cover of mediation to suppress Chinese

democratic forces and to make China an American colony.” 39 Communist propaganda began to bitterly question the impartiality and disinterestedness of US as a mediator in China affairs.

Refuting these accusations, General Marshall observed that “the Chinese Communist Party seemed to become a prey to Communist suspicion and distrust and to tend to believe its own propaganda partially because of constant repetition of the same theme.”40

According to Marshall, Communist distrust and suspicion of American mediation

culminated in their response to the 10 day cease-fire offer in the fight for the city of Kalgan, a strategic communist stronghold in the north China province of Chahar then under the attack by government troops. Marshal admitted he had made “exhaustive efforts” to obtain this offer from the Generalissimo as his last desperate effort to restore the deteriorating situation.41 From his perspective, the CCP should have warmly welcomed this truce. In fact, he was totally baffled by the Communists’ blunt refusal. Dong Biwu, a ranking member of Communist delegation, explained to him the reason of refusal. In addition to the factors related to KMT, Dong politely yet clearly indicated Communist distrust of the American government. As Marshall described it,

“the Communists hoped that Dr. Stuart and Could on the one hand have the United States

Government stop its one-sided aid to the Chinese Government and on the other hand could ‘have

39 Ibid., 454. 40 Ibid., 443. 41 Ibid., 296.

a fair mediating process which would be acceptable to both sides.’”42 Dong’s warning echoed

Mao’s suspicion that seen in is earlier in his press interview, discussed above. Since they

perceived American mediation as a plot to protect Chiang’s offensives, they in turn logically

rejected Marshall’s “good will” peace initiative so as not to give any political or propaganda

capital to Marshall or Chiang.

Late 1948 and early 1949 saw the collapse of Nationalist rule politically, economically,

and militarily. Under domestic and American pressure, in a statement on January 1, 1949,

President Chiang announced that he would resign from office, and demanded a cease-fire and peace negotiation with Communists. Mao’s response came on January 14, when he issued his statement about the present situation. In it, he repudiated Chiang’s New Year announcement, and then listed eight conditions for the negotiation, which included the punishment of the war criminals (including Chiang), the abolishment the current constitution and judiciary system, the confiscation of enterprises owned by government and KMT elites, and formation of a new government excluding KMT and its allies. These conditions were non-negotiable.43 In this

manner, this response was actually a demand for KMT’s non-conditional surrender. Chiang

stepped down on January 21 and was replaced by Vice President Li Zongren, but Chiang

remained in control of the army, the Nationalist Party, and many government offices. Li hoped

to hold the Communists north of the Yangzi River and tried to negotiate with Mao, who adhered

to his eight-point surrender program.

On April 15, Zhou provided the Nationalist delegation with the final draft of the peace

agreement, and announced an ultimatum: “we require that the Nationalist government at Nanjing

42 Ibid., 298. 43 Mao, “Statement about the Current Situation by Mao Zedong, Chairman of CCP Central Committee”, in Mao ze dong xuan ji (Selected works of Mao Zedong 毛泽东选集) (Beijing: ren min chu ban she, 1991), vol. 4, p. 1389.

make a reply to this. If they decline, we will cross the (Yangzi) River.” 44 After Li refused to sign the agreement, on April 21, as Zhou threatened, Communist forces as crossed the Yangzi River and conquered the most parts of mainland China in a swift manner.

By reviewing this history of cease-fire negotiations in Chinese civil war, we may make two conclusions. First, the CCP leadership had a deep distrust and suspicion of American mediation and involvement in the Chinese civil war. They refuted in the end the impartiality of

Marshall’s mission. In their opinion, the cease-fires mediated by Marshall were plots to allow

Nationalist troops to regroup for further attacks, although they also adopted such realist attitude toward cease-fires.

Secondly, we may find a model of CCP’s attitudes on cease-fire and peace negotiations.

When they were weak militarily, their goal was a non-conditional cease-fire, regardless the length or extent. When they were sure their military situation was improving, and they perceived that the negotiation was harmful to their propaganda or military goals, they tended to attach military or political conditions to the cease-fire. When they were in absolute military superiority, they would raise many political pre-conditions to the cease-fire, which amounted to a surrender ultimatum. This model is illustrated in Figure 1.

This model may be used as a tool to analyze Mao and Zhou’s decision-making in cease- fire negotiations during the Korean War. In 1951 they adopted a pre-conditional cease-fire policy, which required the retreat of all foreign troops from Korea and Taiwan and the PRC’s right to represent China in the UN. Although this set of conditions was in no way similar with the eight conditions that Mao raised in January 1949, it was quite comparable to the set of conditions that

Zhou put forward in the Kalgan cease-fire negotiations in October 1946, which included, among

44 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), April 15, 1949, p.416.

others, the retreat of Nationalist troops back to the earlier lines and the veto power of CCP and

its allies in the new National government.

Figure.1 CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Cease-fire Prediction Model 45

Independent Variable Intervening Variable Dependent Variable (Policy Options)

Request or even begging for a truce at the cost of Extremely low otherwise unthinkable concessions

External military Confidence and pressure; the need assessment of Non-conditional truce to maximize L Communist Low to medium diplomatic comparative means for superiority of High security and military power victory to its adversary Very high Pre-conditional truce

Demand for surrender

By applying this model, this policy was based on the intervening variable showing that CCP’s assessment of its military capability and the chance of victory was high. As we see later, it is in this assessment that Mao had a serious mistake, because a huge gap existed between his assessment and the reality, and this gap was directly responsible for the defeats of CCP’s diplomacy in UN.

1.3 The Sources of Military Adventurism

Mao’s military adventurism is the key to understanding the erroneous nature of his assessment of the situation on the ground, and thus the misplaced confidence with which he approached the negotiations at the UN. Military adventurism was a fundamental characteristic of

Mao’s command of communist troops in Korea. This ungrounded adventurism began from mid

45 The form of this model is inspired by the “mobilization model” in Christensen, Useful Adversaries, p. 13.

December 1950, when he ordered to Peng’s troops to cross the 38th parallel in a rushed manner, and only ended in July 1951, when the frustrated Mao looked for all possible means to stop the advance of UN troops, which led to the start of Kaesong truce talks. As scholars including Hunt and Christensen have pointed out, for more than six months, Mao’s goal was to expel the UN forces from the peninsula by destroying a significant portion of the American ground troops.

Material from the Chronicle of Peng Dehuai, further demonstrated this point by providing many pivotal facts and details of the decision makings process between Mao and his associates.46 The

Chronicle of Peng Dehuai, the correspondence between Mao and Stalin and Mao’s manuscripts

together provide a more convincing and well-rounded case for Mao’s, and to some extent,

Stalin’s adventurist military command in those months.

Military adventurism, that is, cases in which adventurous or opportunist thinking dominated the setting of strategic goals and the selection of operational tactics, was not a recent phenomenon for the Chinese Communist Party. These three cases involving either Peng Dehuai or Mao Zedong, may to facilitate our understanding of this phenomenon.

Arguably the earliest case of military adventurism on the part of the Communist Party occurred in the summer of 1930, when the CCP leadership decided that the central task of CCP was to “utilize the maximum strength to achieve the success in capturing the city of Wuchang

(武昌 a key strategic port of Yangtze River in central China)” and the neighboring provinces, in order to convene the First National Soviet Conference to establish a national regime.” 47 In

46 Wang Yan 王焰 ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life 彭德怀年谱) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1998). 47 CCP National Organization Conference, “ The Current Political Situation and the Party’s Organization Tasks”, July 22, 1930, in Central Archival Institute 中央档案馆 Ed., Zhong gong zhong yang wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee 中共中央文件选集) (Beijing: Zhong yang dang xiao chu ban she, 1980), Vol. 6 (1930), p. 182. It could also be argued that the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927, in which both Stalin and Mao Zedong played key roles, was an example of military adventurism.

addition to political and economic reasons, the military rationale for this all-out offense was that

“the increasingly expansion of current wars among warlords….would lead to the ultimate

collapse of their rule……the rapid expansion of Red Army, recently it began to attack big cities,

and the soldiers in Warlords’ forces are becoming revolutionized and the number of defectors is

increasing.”48

Peng Dehuai, then the commander of the Red Third Army based in Southeast of Hubei

Prince, was in charge of Communist offensive to capture Wuchang. In his posthumously

published memoir, which is based on his appeal letters and self-confessions during his house- arrest and prison years in his later life when he faced political disgrace and prosecution, Peng confessed his disagreement with CCP top leaders on the assessment on the military situation of

China. As he saw it, “the domestic warlord warfare would not necessarily escalate to the end of all being defeated and wounded, or their ultimate collapse. Nor did I see our Party had conducted much defector-persuasion work in the White Army. Every time we fought the enemy, we solely relied on our valor and will to gain the victory. Never did I see any uprising inside the enemy to aid us.”49 Furthermore, he criticized the plan to attack Wuchang as an adventurous plan: “there

were five regiments garrisoned in Wuchang with reinforced fortifications; the Yanzi River was

full of imperialist battleships… (Enemy reinforcements) would approach us from the rear…so in

the front, a stronghold city, in the rear, no escape route, alongside, the River, in the back, the

South Lake, we would face a risk of being totally annihilated. ” 50 Although Peng had to follow

this directive, the plan was terminated in the process, not because of any serious defeats in the

48 Ibid..

49 Peng, Dehuai 彭德怀, Peng de huai zi shu (Self-accounts of Peng Dehuai 彭德怀自述) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1981), p. 150.

50 Ibid..

battlefield, which was supposed to happen, but because of a new Moscow decision to put the

“adventurism” to an end in September 1930.51

The second example of military adventurism in CCP history was much more catastrophic.

This was CCP’s “Fifth Anti-Annihilation Campaign” against Chiang Kai-shek’s newly mobilized offensive from 1933 to 1934. This time, Chiang deployed up to 500 thousand troops, and more interestingly, he hired many German advisers, who proposed an attrition war featuring the buildup of fortifications along the way of gradual advancement. On the other hand, encouraged by its newly expanded Soviet areas and red troops, as well as the pressure of KMT’s new tactics, the CCP (partly at the urging of Comintern representative Otto Braun) adopted more regular warfare tactics (such as “trench war” or “positional war”) and neglected their traditional guerilla or mobile warfare tactics (such as Mao’s technique of luring enemy forces in deep and then cutting them off). Under the de-facto command of Otto Braun, the Red Army strived to achieve the goals expressed by such slogans as “ward the enemy off the gate of our country

(Soviet Republic of China),” “never give up one inch of Soviet land.”52 These goals and

approaches become easy targets of Mao and his associates later on at a expanded Poliburo

meeting at Zunyi in January 1935, after the red forces had retreated from the Soviet Republic.53

They attacked that Braun enforced a military adventurism in his command because he

disastrously overestimated the fire power and capabilities of Red forces to such extent that he

51 “CCP Politburo Telegram to Comintern to Implement its Directive in Ending the Policy of Armed Rebellions in Wuhan[Wuchang] and Nanking”, September 8, 1930, in Central Archival Institute dd., wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee), Vol. 6 (1930), p. 256. 52 “Politburo Resolution on the Report of the Fifth Anti-Annihilation Campaign”, in Central Archival Institute ed., wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee), Vol. 10 (1934-1935), p. 457. 53 Ibid..

believed that they could prevail in regular warfare with KMT troops. 54

Peng admitted in his memoir that then he did not have enough knowledge and

experience to refute Braun’s military line yet as a field commander, he was deeply frustrated

with Braun’s “bypassing direct command” in the battle in Guangchang (广昌), a fort that had strategic value to the whole Soviet Republic. He complained: “I said repeatedly that it was impossible to hold Guangchang in our hands; we must give fair assessment of the enemy’s equipments in today. Even the relatively good quality field defense works (a key element in

Braun’s plan) could be of no use under the enemy bombardment. . . . Only after one day of fighting, a few of our attack attempts failed with nearly one thousand of casualties. All men of the battalion that was deployed inside Braun’s so-called permanent defense works were sacrificed, and none of them came out alive.” The outraged Peng confronted Braun face to face later and attacked him as “a son who sold his father’s lands felt no pains in heart” in his meaningless wasting of Communist military sources and soldiers’ lives.55 After this offense

against his Moscow superior, Peng expected a serious punishment was coming: “I packed my old

uniform in the bag, and was ready to go with him (Braun) to Ruijin [Soviet Capital] to get a

public trial, to get dismissed from the Party, to be executed. All were ready. I had no regrets.”56

The loss of Guangchang, together with other setbacks, decimated Communist forces and

eventually led to the loss of the once thriving Soviet Republic in Jiangxi Province, and the start

of Communist relocation to Northwest China, which was known as Long March.

54 Braun, on the other hand, strongly disagreed with the accusations. He argued that even Mao was in command, facing the new military situation, Mao’s approaches, too, would have failed. See Li De (Otto Braun), Zhong guo ji shi (Memoirs of China Travel), Pp. 94-96, Pp.133-134. 55 Ibid., 191. 56 Ibid..

The third example was the Siping (or Sipingjie 四平, 四平街) battle in Manchuria in the

months of April and May, 1946. The backdrop for this intense battle between CCP and KMT

forces was that earlier in March, Soviet forces, which had stationed in Manchuria since Soviet

participation into the war against Japan in August, 1945, suddenly fully withdrew from

Manchuria as a response (officially) to the widespread anti-Soviet protests in China (partly

sponsored by KMT). The vacuum created by Soviet army’s sudden retreat was largely filled by

Communist forces, who were less trained yet larger in number than their Nationalist adversaries.

As a result, Communists occupied Changchun, Siping, and Harbin, Benxi, and many other

important cities and a large share of Manchurian industrial areas, which were much needed to

Communist war efforts. Siping was railway city linking KMT-held Shenyang and Changchun,

which the Communists had just captured from a token Nationalist garrison force. If the KMT

occupied Siping, then Communist Changchun (former capital of Manchukuo) would be very

difficult to defend.

Although Mao was the supreme commander of this battle, his command was nevertheless full of problems, which arguably would be termed as adventurous. First of all, he overestimated the strategic value of Changchun and therefore of Siping, the door to Changchun, and thus decided that they must be defended at all costs. In his directives, he said, “the occupation of

Changchun was extremely influential to the situation in Manchuria and the whole China,” and

“we should assign troops to prepare food and ammunition to defend the city to death.”57 By

doing this, Mao violated his well-known strategic approach of “encircling the cities from the

57 Mao, “Telegram to Peng (zhen) and Lin (Biao): the Military and Political Work after the Occupation of Changchun”, April 19, 1946, and Mao, “Telegram to Peng (zhen) and Lin (Biao) : Southern Manchuria Should Send Troops to the North; Changchun should be defended to Death” , April 29, 1946, in Mao, Mao ze dong jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works of Mao Zedong 毛泽东军事文集) (Beijing: Jun shi ke xue chu ban she, 1993), Vol. 3, p. 171, p. 177

rural areas,” which opposed to occupying big cities until the last stage of revolution war when

Communists have accumulated sufficient sources and power in the countryside bases. In the first

months of 1946 in Manchuria, Communists were still struggling in consolidating their newly

established rural bases, where the new regime was fragile with old ruling classes yet to be wiped

out and bandits still rampant. Second, Mao overestimated the capabilities of his troops. On April

26, 1946 he told his generals, “With only two regiments with poor fire power, we have been able

to defend Siping for eight days.”58 Two days later, he reiterated: “We must defend every inch of

Siping to the death” ; 59 “ (we must ) reinforce the buildup in Siping, and annihilate the main strengths of the New 1st Army”; 60 “ (we) must manage to defeat the New 6th Army and defend

Siping to the death.”61 By doing this, Mao abandoned his long advocacy of the mobile warfare

over the conventional trench warfare, to which he adamantly opposed throughout his military

career, for instance, when he (like Peng Dehuai) violently attacked Braun’s command of

Communist forces before the Long March , saying: “ they [Braun and his CCP supporters]

replaced the active defense with the passive defense, and replaced mobile war with positional

war, which led to… the loss of the main strength of the Red Army and the Central Soviet

Base.”62 Ironically, at Siping in the spring of 1946, he repeated voluntarily what Braun did in the

battle of Guangchang in 1934. Third, Mao assigned much value to the battle of Siping in order to

increase Communist bargaining power in the cease-fire negation that was underway in China’s capital Nanjing between Zhou Enlai and KMT with General Marshall as the mediator. He said,

58 Mao, “Telegram to Cheng”, April 26, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 186. 59 Mao, “Telegram to Lin”, April 30, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 190. 60 Mao, “Telegram to Peng and Lin”, April 19, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 171. 61 Mao, “Telegram to Lin”, May 15, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 218 62 “Politburo Resolution on the Report of the Fifth Anti-Annihilation Campaign”, in Central Archival Institute Ed., wen jian xuan ji (Selected Documents of CCP Central Committee), Vol. 10 (1934-1935), Pp. 454-455.

“Chiang Kai-shek has rejected the cease-fire proposal by Marshall, Democratic League, and our

Party, and insists on Nationalist control of Changchun. Therefore, we must continue to fight in

Siping and Benxi, to exhaust his troops, weaponry, and ammunition to the maximum extent…on

the other hand, our forces and equipment can be reinforced because we have Changchun and

Harbin in hand. Then, we are possible to achieve a peace that is favorable to us.”63 With such

diplomatic consideration, it was difficult, if not possible, for Mao to take the battle of Siping as a

sole military campaign, and hence it impaired his assessments of the both sides in the battlefield

in purely military terms, a model that repeated itself in Mao’s performance in the cease-fire

negotiation in Korean War in late 1950.. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek sent some of his most

powerful troops to the battlefield, including the 1st Army, and the New 6th Army, with full air

and artillery cover. Eventually, Communist defense collapsed on May 18, when the field

commander Lin Biao, hurried to order his remnant troops to withdraw from the battlefield even

before he received the approval from Mao, which reached to him on the next day.64 The gap of time was a vivid case of “act before approval,” and it showed how urgent and dangerous the battlefield was to the Communists. The KMT’s ensuing advancement seemed unstoppable for quite a while. Communists not only lost Changchun, but also were driven back to their far northern base in Harbin, a city was more than two hundred miles from Siping.

As a great mobile/guerilla warfare thinker and commander, Mao’s inherent negligence or underestimate of the importance of logistics had been baffling to some of his generals in the years of 1946 to 1949, when China’s civil war escalated into full-sized all-out conflicts between the regular armies of CCP and KMT. In a telegram to Chen Yi and Su Yu, field commanders of

Communist troops in Eastern China, Mao elaborated his ideas on logistics: “you and every one in

63 Mao “Telegram to Lin” , May 1, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 195. 64 Mao, “Telegram to Lin”, May 19, 1946, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 3, p. 224.

your troops should set up quickly the concept of non-base warfare. Personnel, food, ammunition,

clothing, all of these should be supplied from the enemy, from the enemy-controlled areas….

POWs should be recruited into the battle units immediately….Don't carry heavy artillery…. ”65

Chen and Su were shocked by Mao’s bold ideas, because to them, the war in 1947 was in a much

different form from what it was in their guerilla years back in 1930s. Now with a much larger

regular army rather than a small guerilla platoon or company, a reliable and responsive logistic

system with quick and sufficient supplies had become a necessary condition for any victory of the Communist forces. Heavy artillery, in particular, was an invaluable asset to Communist forces, and the abandonment of this weaponry was really a last option to them. Chen and Su tried to evade Mao’s order yet their reluctance eventually enraged Mao. In his book, Lanxin

Xiang shows how Mao’s military “fantasy” in guerrilla warfare caused friction between him and his generals (Chen and Su), especially in the summer of 1947, when Chen and Su resisted Mao’s

“Southern Strategy,” which required Chen and Su’s forces to relocated far to the rear of KMT areas to conduct new offensives.66 Related to this thesis, we would see that in the case of Korea,

although Mao admitted CPV’s weaknesses in firepower, his strategic planning was still largely

based on the experience that he gained in his guerrilla war years, and such mentality caused

serious frictions between him and Peng Dehuai, his battlefield commander..

1.4 A New Start: PRC’s Diplomatic Doctrines and Foreign Policy

CCP set up very a different diplomatic system, doctrine, foreign policy goals from its predecessor KMT. The PRC’s foreign policy also had distinctive characteristics that

65 Mao, “Telegram to Chen and Su”, September 3, 1947, in Mao, Jun shi wen ji (Collection of Military Works), Vol. 4, p. 236. 66 Lanxin Xiang, Mao's Generals: Chen Yi and the New Fourth Army (Lanham: University Press Of America, 1998) , Pp. 146-147.

differentiated it from Western diplomatic systems, such as that of the US. A review of the

aspects of this system is necessary for our study of Communist diplomatic behavior in the

Korean War.

1.4.1 General-Ambassadors: the Dismissal of Nationalist Diplomats

The newly empowered Communist Party dissolved the old Republican diplomatic system

once and for all in 1949, both because of ideological imperatives, and because of its long brutal

history with KMT. CCP denounced the old system as having been weak and incompetent in

protecting China’s national interests from foreign powers, mainly U.S, and Japan, and often

labeled its diplomats as “running dogs” of foreign imperialists and “traitors” of Chinese national

interests. The highly sensitive nature of diplomatic work was another reason to eliminate the old

system and its personnel. . The CCP found it unacceptable to appoint diplomats from the KMT

or other political parties to positions in the new diplomatic system, even though it did hire many

non-party officials in other less sensitive positions. As a result, the old diplomats, especially

those in top positions, had two options for their precarious future: to flee with the KMT regime

to Taiwan, as most of them did, or to stay on the mainland waiting to be demoted to some trivial

position and to work in distrust, or simply to be fired or imprisoned. A directive of Zhou to

Wang Jiaxiang who was the Communist ambassador to Soviet Union in late 1949 repealed this

policy clearly, “The staff of the old embassy do not need to be concentrated in Harbin, but

should be sent directly to Beijing. After the examination the good ones should accept training,

and the bad ones should be dismissed.”67

67 Zhou, “Telegram to Wang Jiaxiang”, December 12, 1950, in Zhou, Jiang guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), Vol. 1, p. 658n

The top diplomats in the Republican period were well-known for their American

educational background and non-party professionalism. The best known among them included

Wellington V.K. Koo, T.F. Tsiang， Hu Shi，and T.V. Soong. Wellington Koo, one of the best

trained and experienced diplomats, found himself one of 43 most-wanted war criminals in Mao’s

announced in early 1949. With his strong anti-communist attitude and his American training, he

chose to continue to work with the KMT government in Taiwan for the rest of his life. Koo was

not alone. Most of the senior diplomats fled mainland China when Communist victory was

beyond any doubt in 1949.

With the lack of trained party-member diplomats available, the CCP had to look for

candidates from its military and political work systems. This context saw the birth of the so-

called “general-ambassadors” and “general-diplomats,” an important feature of the new system.

Chen Yi , Wu Xiuquan, Geng Biao, Ji Pengfei, Huang Zhen, among many others, were generals

or high ranking military officers who were assigned voluntarily or involuntarily to key

diplomatic positions of the new government. By late 1950, The Party had sent out 15

ambassadors to states that newly recognized the regime. Eleven of them of were army-corps

level (兵团级) generals.

The criteria for selecting top diplomats were succinctly listed in Zhou Enlai’s directive to

the CCP’s Organization Department in South China in December 1949:

The Ministerial criteria of selecting ambassadors and consuls: 1) political loyalty and reliability; 2) knowledgeable, any ability in using foreign language would be a plus; 3) cautious, well-rounded, determined to implement policies and observe the leaders; 4) division, brigade or above level cadres.68

68 Zhou, Manuscripts, Vol. 1, p. 710. “外交部选派大使、公使、领事人员条件:(一)政治上忠实可靠;(二)相当丰富知识，能懂外国语更好;(三)谨慎周详.能坚决执行政策，服从领导;(四)师团级以上干部。”

From these standards, we can see that the party loyalty and the obedience to superiors

were much more important than any professional background or experience. CCP military

personnel fit these criteria. Accordingly, those candidates who successfully passed the selection

process would inevitably bring certain characteristics to their new jobs, including both

determination and rigidity. Due to their military background, they tended to be follow orders

from their superiors in a rigid manner, rather than to be flexible and independent in the scope of

their authority. Thus as diplomats, they turned out to be messengers rather than negotiators.

Wu Xiuquan, usually referred as General Wu in UN debates and American press, was a

fine example of this new generation. Wu was a Soviet-trained military and intelligence officer.

From 1927 to 1929, he studied in the Infantry School in Moscow.69 After graduation, he worked

as an agent in the Far East National Security Bureau in Khabarovsk, where he was accepted as a

member of Soviet Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1930.70 His Russian was so good that in

1933, two years after he returned to China, in 1933, he was appointed involuntarily as the

interpreter for Otto Braun (or Li De), the German-born military adviser of Comintern

(Communist International) to its Chinese branch.71 In contrast to some other Soviet-trained

students, Wu switched his political position from upholding the Comintern line to supporting

Mao fairly early. Even at the historical CCP politburo meeting held at Zunyi in January, 1935, in

which Mao restored his military leadership, Braun had noticed that Wu distanced himself from

the Soviet line: “Wu was obviously not pleased to be my interpreter, and his translation was

69 Wu, Xiuquan 伍修权, Hui yi yu huai nian (Memoirs 回忆与怀念）. （Beijing: Zhong Gong Zhong Yang Dang Xiao Chu Ban She, 1991）, Pp. 54-70 70 Ibid., 71-75 71 Ibid., 103

incomplete.”72 Moreover, he had an aggressive personality and speech style. According to

Braun, the last time he saw Wu was in his home country, “in the Sixth Congress of Socialist

Unity Party of Germany in 1963, I watched him from distance, listening to his diatribe against

our brother party, and how the delegates had to order him to follow the rules of the meeting.”73

Wu could not speak English, yet he had an experience in dealing with Americans in 1946 when

he worked as a liaison officer in Military Mediation Committee of Three in Beijing. Last but not

least, he was a pro-Soviet Chinese communist. Although he had to follow Mao’s line in the Sino-

Soviet split later on, in early 1950s, he seemed to embrace the communist internationalism

wholeheartedly, and, like many Chinese Communists in the 1950s, he took the Soviet Union as

the model of Communism . In his memoir, he showed a deep affection and respect for Stalin.74

Given these traits, it was predictable that Wu would be a difficult figure for Americans to deal

with during his trip to the UN in New York.

1.4.2 Diplomacy as a Struggle

In addition to this personality factor, the CCP’s conceptualization of its diplomacy to the

Western camp also played a pivotal role in the drama of Wu’s delegation. Zhou Enlai was the de

facto master mind of PRC diplomacy at this time. In his Manuscripts, a reader may find many

articles in foreign affairs. Mao appeared to have been surprisingly passive in the regime’s

foreign affairs. Throughout the first volume of the Manuscripts of Mao Zedong Since the

Founding of PRC, the so far most complete collection of Mao’s works from October 1949 to

72 Li De (Otto Braun 李德), Zhong guo ji shi (Memoirs of China Travel 中国纪事) （Beijing: xian dai shi liao bian kan she 1980）, p. 140. Braun’s memoir was published originally in German in East Germany in 1974. It was later translated into English, see Braun, Otto. A Comintern agent in China 1932-1939. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1982. This study refers to its Chinese version. 73 Ibid., 278 74 Wu, Hui yi yu huai nian (Memoirs), p.252

December 1950, there are very few articles in addressing strategies, policies, personnel or other

key issues in foreign affairs except for some formal diplomatic correspondence.75

Zhou’s articles, speeches, and directives on foreign policy in 1949 and 1950 clearly

indicate that the fundamental basis of Zhou’s approach to foreign policy was that “diplomacy is

struggle/war.” Zhou elaborated on this concept in the keynote speech at the founding ceremony

of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs on November 8, 1949. To treat diplomacy as a war, one

must differentiate allies from enemies. Describing the policy to be adopted toward allies, Zhou

observed: “strategically, we should unite with them, yet tactically we can critique them.” As for

the appropriate policy stance to take toward enemies: “strategically we oppose them, yet

tactically on some particular issues we may unite them.”76 Since diplomacy is a complicated and

serious struggle, iron discipline was needed: “every word we say or everything we do may

impact the fight, so we must have strict discipline. It is very important that everything be asked,

discussed, and approved before it can be done, and afterwards it should be reported.” 77 Because

of the belligerent nature of diplomacy, diplomats play as fighters, so he/she should be tough and

uncompromising. As a warning to the new diplomats, Zhou harshly denounced the diplomacy of

previous Chinese governments:

Chinese reactionaries were all weak in diplomacy and scared to death of the imperialists. The Empress Dowager, Yuan Shikaii, or Chiang Kai-shek, which of them was not bowing down with their knees on the ground in doing diplomatic business?78

75 This may either because an censorhip decision was made not to publish most Mao’s foreign policies articles, which otherwise were existed, or simply because Mao delegated most of his authority in foriegn affairs to Zhou. 76 Zhou, “New China’s Diplomatic Work,” in Zhou, Wai jiao wen xuan （Selected Diplomatic Works）, p. 2. 77 Ibid., 7. 78 Ibid. 5

1.4.3 Split with the West

On the policy level, in the relations with the West, PRC needed to address two most

urgent issues, both of which were closely related: first, how to deal with the interests of Western

countries in China, which were protected by many treaties signed by the Manchu Qing Imperial

government or Nationalist government? These interests included embassies, consulates and

diplomats, bilateral or multilateral treaties, companies, banks, hospitals, schools, churches, and

so on. And second, how to pursue diplomatic recognition from the West?

CCP adopted an aggressive and revolutionary approach in both issues. In his report of

CCP Central Committee in March 1949, Mao announced Communist intention to pursue a total

split with the West, “non-recognition of the legal status of foreign diplomatic instates and their

diplomats of KMT era; non-recognition of the existence of all treacherous treaties of KMT era;

the cancellation of all Imperialist propaganda institutes in China; the immediate control of the

foreign trade; the reform of customs system….regarding the remnant imperialist economic and

culture enterprises, we allow them to exist on temporary basis under our monitor yet we would

look for a final solution for them after we achieve our national victory.” 79

That final solution was reached and was revealed by Zhou Enlai in one of his speeches a

few years later in 1952 when he said: “during the period of American invasion of Korea….we

took over the charge of American assets in China, and then took charge of the cultural institutes

that were subsidized by American imperialists.”80 Also in the speech, Zhou revealed a massive and brutal Communist anti-America propaganda program that normally featured thought reform

79 Mao, “Report to the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee of CCP”, March 5, 1949, in Mao, Zedong, Mao ze dong xuan ji (Selected Works of Mao Zedong 毛泽东选集)(Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1991), Vol. 4, p. 1434. 80 Zhou, “Our Diplomatic Line and Tasks”, April 30, 1952, in Zhou, Enlai, Zhou en lai wai jiao wen xuan (Selected Diplomatic Works of Zhou Enlai 周恩来外交文选) (Beijing: Zhong yang wen xian chu ban she, 1990), p. 50.

and in some cases, physical persecution: “We took advantage of the Movement to Resist

America and Aid Korea to swiftly cleanse thoughts and sentiments of the worship and fear of

Americans. Otherwise, this task would have to take a few years or even a few decades to

accomplish.”81 Regarding the diplomatic recognition of new Communist regime, Mao also announced the Communists’ hard-line policy: “we should not hurry to solve this problem, and

neither should we do so after we achieve national victory…. Imperialists, who have treated

Chinese people with hostile attitude all the way down, would be impossible to treat us on an

equal basis soon. As long as they maintain their hostile attitude, never would we recognize their

legal status in China.”82 The somewhat xenophobic nature of CCP’s behavior was notoriously evident in their humiliating and final expelling thousands of foreign missionaries in late 1949 and early 1950.

From the Communist point of view, these policies were necessity from at least two perspectives. First, since the CCP achieved its power by armed rebellion rather than any peaceful or legal means, it needed to appeal to the Chinese people’s sense of nationalism in order to strengthen its moral legitimacy as a new regime. The legacies of China’s hundred years of national humiliation by the West since 1840s were a convenient source for any of such appeal.

Second, such a split also served CCP’s need to soothe Moscow’s worry that PRC might become a neutral or pro-West state just as Tito’s Yugoslavia had become. Moscow’s worry was not without any reason. In the formation of the first central government of the PRC, communists

only had a marginal majority over the non-communist “democrats.” Hence, a violent anti-

Western foreign policy was necessary to enhance the PRC’s image in the Eastern bloc.

81 Ibid. 82 Mao, “Report to the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee of CCP”, March 5, 1949, in Mao, xuan ji (Selected Works), Vol. 4, Pp. 1434-1435.

From the perspective of the diplomatic profession, however, these policies were

unnecessarily radical and adventurous. If the Communists had been more mild in their posture

and demands, and slowed down the process, if they had had followed the normal diplomatic

negotiation process, rather than insisting on their imposing pre-conditions on the negotiation format, then PRC’s diplomatic goals would have been easier and sooner to be met. Washington had been looking to establish some working relationship with the new regime as we see in the efforts by US ambassador to China John Leighton Stuart in those months.83 If Beijing had

showed some good will tactically to Washington by distancing itself from Moscow, and had

showed some respect toward foreign interests in China, then its confrontation with the West

would not have been as intense as it was. Yet this split and confrontation may have been

unavoidable, given the immaturity of the PRC diplomatic apparatus and doctrine and its foreign

policies.

1.4.4 Lean to One Side: Sino-Soviet Alliance

Another key factor of the PRC’s diplomacy in the early 1950s was that Stalin and the

Soviet Union often played a leading role in dealing with challenging issues such as China’s

representation in the UN, General Wu’s delegation, the Korean War truce negotiations, and the

Geneva Conference. To put it bluntly, Stalin was the boss of Zhou and Mao. This authority was not only rooted in the Soviet Union’s power and assistance to China, but was also linked to

Stalin’s personality and capability. Stalin had been observing the Chinese revolution for nearly three decades, and had provided many guidelines and suggestions over the decades, some of which were right whereas others were not. As the experienced Communist supreme leader, in the

83 John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China: the Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart Missionary and Ambassador (New York, Random House 1954), Chapter 12 (Inside the Bamboo Curtain).

case of Korean War, he showed a strategic and tactical maturity that Mao and Zhou had yet to

achieve. For example, on December 7, 1950, under pressure from non-Western countries to start

truce negations with the UN forces, Zhou drafted five conditions as prerequisites for the truce.

Zhou then sent this draft to Mao for approval. Mao thought that China might be better off if a

more tactical strategy was adopted rather than Zhou’s directly confrontational proposal, which

was the equivalent of laying all China’s cards on the table.84 Yet even Mao was not experienced

enough to elaborate his rough idea to a feasible plan. So he suggested Zhou to pursue advice

from Kremlin.85 Zhou then summoned Soviet ambassador to China Roshchin at 3:00 am on

December 7, and forwarded his draft to Stalin as an “extremely urgent” matter.86 Stalin replied

quickly early in the next morning. He vetoed Zhou’s draft and instead provided his own detailed

draft which was much more cautious, sophisticated, and tactical than Zhou’s.87 Zhou then sent

Stalin’s draft to Wu as a formal reply to Indian representative’s request. Later on January 13, in

one of his cablegrams back to Moscow, Roshchin said, “Zhou Enlai asked me to express his deep

gratitude to Filippov [Stalin’s pseudonym] for his suggestions and advice.”88

At the government level, the close relation between the two countries was mainly

reflected in the promulgation of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual

Assistance, which was signed on February 14, 1950, in Moscow. The treaty established a

military-political coalition between the countries on the principle of collective security: if one

84 Zhou, “Letter to Mao Concerning Consultation with Soviets about Conditions of Cease-fire in Korea”, in Zhou, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts from the Founding of PRC), vol. 3, p. 606. 85 Ibid.. 86 Zhou (via Roshchin), “Telegram Concerning Chinese Government’s Conditions of Cease-fire in Korea”, December 7, 1950, in Shen ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives) , vol. 2, pp. 639-640. 87 Stalin (Via Gromyko), “Telegram Concerning Soviet Approval of Chinese Government’s Conditions of Cease- fire in Korea”, December 7, 1950, in Shen ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives) , vol. 2, pp. 641-642. 88 Roshchin, “Telegram to Vyshinsky about the Coming Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung Summit”, in Shen ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives) , vol. 2, p. 659.

party“being subjected to attack by Japan or any state allied with her [mainly US], thus finding

itself in a state of war,” the other party “will immediately render military or other aid with all

means at its disposal.”Broadly, it stipulated that each party “will cooperate with each other in all

important international quest ions touching on the mutual interests.” Moreover, the Treaty

formalized Soviet promise for Communist China’s economic development, “to render ….every

possible economic aid, and realize the necessary economic cooperation.”89

89 For a full text of the document in English, see “Texts of the Agreements Concluded Between the Soviet Union and PRC”, New York Times, February 15, 1950.

CHAPTER 2

WU XIUQUAN’S MISSION TO THE UN

In this chapter, the aspects of Wu Xiuquan’s mission to the UN in late 1950 are analyzed and evaluated. The following questions are examined: the background, motivation and goals, and debates at UN; private interactions; Soviet involvement; Washington’s assessments;

Beijing’s calculations; and the end of the mission. Special attention is paid to the performance of the Mission, and to Beijing’s assessment of the battlefield situation and its impact on the overall policy making process.

2.1 Korean War: the Turning Point

Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War in June in 1950, it was generally expected that the United States and other Western nations would eventually recognize the new government of the People’s Republic of China and that the PRC would take over China’s seat at the UN. First, it seemed only a matter of time before Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army would cross the

Taiwan Strait to bring an end to the desperate KMT regime which had already lost all mainland territories and withdrawn to Taiwan with extremely low morale and with its military and political structure disorganized. The PLA, aided by the new Sino-Soviet alliance set up during Mao’s visit to Moscow in February, 1950, had attained some much needed military assistance from their

Soviet comrades, especially in the air coverage, in order to be prepared to launch the final decisive attack. According Xiaobing Li, in the early spring of 1950, two Chinese generals

(General Su Yu and Admiral Xiao Jingguang) had drafted a detailed plan to “liberate” Taiwan, which would mobilize 800 thousand troops. A combined exercise would be organized in late

spring of 1951. Taiwan would be attacked by “a joint air-sea-land amphibious force.” 90 The plan was approval by CCP Central Military Commission in late march, 1950.91

Second, since September 1948, when PLA succeeded in its occupying Jinan, a pivotal

Nationalist stronghold in the Shandong Peninsula, the disillusioned Department of State had

switched its China policy from “utilizing all means to stop Communist victory” to “preventing

China from becoming a Soviet satellite.” This so-called “disengagement” policy, evidenced later

by the State Department’s China White Paper, was a clear message that US was going to forsake

its Nationalist ally. The main point of the lengthy document is what summarized by Dean

Acheson, “the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control the government of

the United States,” because regardless how many aids US provided to Chiang Kai-shek, he could not win the war.92 Acheson attacked mercilessly KMT regime, “its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and its Government had lost popular support.” 93

Although the outbreak of Korean War on June 25, 1950 was a turning point for PRC-US

relations, we must also pay attention to another equally important fact. Even before the first shot

was fired across the 38th parallel, a strong undercurrent within the United States opposed the

continuation of Acheson’s “wait and see” policy toward China. TYhis undercurrent had been

been building among various military and diplomatic, even intelligence agencies inside the US

government. The anger was being fueled by the military-political alliance between Mao and

Stalin, which had delivered a blow to Acheson’s dream that Mao would be another Tito. In

90 Xiaobing li, Hongshan Li, China and the United States: A New Cold War History (Lanham: University Press of America, 1998), p. 51. 91 Ibid.. 92 State Department, The China White Paper, August 1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. XVI, 93 Ibid., XV.

addition, the United States was plunging into the increasingly anti-communist milieu of

McCarthyism. It is only in this context that we can understand why America was able to change its China policy so swiftly and fundamentally. Significant as it was, the Korean War was only the last straw in an accumulation of factors that led to a dramatic change of US Far East Policy.

From this assumption, we can understand why US reactions after the war broke out were

so swift and so aggressive. Within two days, the UN Security Council had passed two resolutions

requiring its members to provide all possible means to repel North Korean aggressors from the

South. The passage of such resolutions was a serious diplomatic blow to the Communist bloc.

Yet ironically, the passage was mainly due to Soviet boycott of the council since January that

year as a protest of the council’s refusal of its request of providing admission to PRC and to

expel the “Chiang Kai-shek reactionary remnant clique”

The decisive moment came on June 27, 1950, when President Truman, who was

extremely worried if the Korean War was the beginning offensive of Moscow’s world conquest,

vowed to stop any further possible communist attack in the Far East. Truman announced these

new policies in a rash manner even without consultation with Chiang Kai-shek’s government:

I have ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action I am calling upon the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. …The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.94

Understandably, the CCP’s furious reaction came swiftly and explosively. On June 28,

Zhou Enlai, Premier of the PRC, issued a powerful statement to denounce Truman’s

announcement. Zhou described Truman’s measure as “armed aggression against the territory of

China and a total violation of the United Nations Charter.” Zhou proclaimed, “All the people of

94 Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 2, p. 339.

our country will certainly fight to the end single-mindedly to liberate Taiwan from the grasp of the American aggressors.” He also called on the people of the world, especially in the Far East, to unite and fight against the "schemes of American imperialism for aggression against China and grabbing Asia by force.” 95 This statement set up the position and tone of Beijing on Taiwan issue for the following two decades until President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972.

Interestingly and importantly, in the following two months from June to August, in other

similar statements and cablegrams, Zhou did not make any formal complaint to either the

Security Council or to the UN General Assembly to request any debates or sanctions about these

“aggressions.” In a note addressed to UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie on July 6, 1950, Zhou only reiterated his accusations and vowed that “despite any military steps of obstruction taken by the United States Government, the Chinese people are irrevocably determined to liberate Taiwan without fail.”96 Thus, Beijing chose to stay outside this institution and frequently made strong

statements. The reason for this passivity is clear: without the presence of Soviet Union, any

complaint from the PRC against US would surely face a veto either directly by US or by the

majority votes under its control.

When Jacob A. Malik, Soviet representative to UN, returned to the Security Council after

a seven- month boycott in August 1, 1950, things began to change. Moscow decided to initiate a diplomatic offensive at UN to compensate for what it had lost in the past few months due to its

absence in the Security Council. Part of this new offensive was to adjust Soviet once seemingly

unshakable policy on China Seat at UN (Expelling KMT and fully accepting CCP). Soviet

diplomats found an urgent need for a Communist China’s voice at the UN podium to support or

95 Zhou, “Statement about American Armed Invasion of Chinese Territory Taiwan,” in Zhou, Wai jiao wen xuan （Selected Diplomatic Works）Pp. 18-19. 96 Zhou, “Statement to United Nations”, July 6, 1950, in Zhou, Jiang guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), Vol. 3, p. 10

to simply echo their position on Korea, for which they often met with hostile oppositions from

the Western bloc. Soviets now only advocated for an temporary participation of PRC delegates

in issues of Korea and Taiwan and the participation was in no means an admission or recognition

of PRC government. On August 4, Soviets proposed a resolution draft at UNSC to put forward

this policy change, “[UNSC] considers it is necessary to invite representatives of the People’s

Central Government of PRC to participate into the discussion on Korean problem.” 97 The draft

was extremely brief and it did not touch upon the China seat issue, which was designed to gain

more support from other non-communist countries.

Accordingly, the CCP switched from its earlier passive attitude toward UN involvement

in Taiwan and Korea, and instead took a much more active, even demanding tone, calling for

UN to address these issues with participation of PRC. On August 20, Zhou cabled Malik, who

was the chairman of UNSC in that month, to express PRC’s “full support” of Soviet August 4

proposal, and claimed for the first time its role on Korea, “a delegate of PRC government, who

represented the 475 million Chinese people, must participate into any UNSC discussion of Korea

problem. ” 98 On August 24, by telegram, Zhou Enlai filed a formal complaint to the UN calling

upon the United Nations Security Council to sanction the US occupation of Taiwan and order US

to withdraw its forces from the island. In another cablegram sent two days later, Zhou expressed

his intention to participate in UN debates in crystal clear language, “The Central People's

Government of the People's Republic of China, being the sole legal government representing the

Chinese people has the right and necessity to send her delegation to attend and join the fifth

97 “Soviet UNSC Representative Resolution Draft on the Peaceful Settlement of Korean Problem”, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, p. 124. 98 “Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai Telegram to UN”, August 20, 1950, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, Pp. 135-136.

session of the United Nations General Assembly.” 99 While Zhou himself made this demand, we

can observe that the first PRC delegation to UN in 1950 was more as a part of Soviet Union’s

UN strategy than a independant decision made by Beijing leadership.

The CCP’s request to participate in the United Nations debates was approved in a steady

way. On September 20, the Soviet Union proposed that the question of US aggression against

China should be included in the agenda of the Fifth Session of the General Assembly. On

September 29, the Security Council eventually adopted a resolution to invite the representative of

Communist China “to attend the meetings of the Security Council held after November 15, 1950

during the discussion of that government's declaration regarding an armed invasion of the Island

of Taiwan (Formosa).”100 This time, the US did not mobilize its allies in the Council to override

this resolution, since inviting a representative from parties involved to attend debates was a

“procedural issue” rather than a “substantive issue.”101 Ernst Gross, the American lieutenant

Ambassador to UN, cast his vote against the resolution, as did T.F. Jiang, the Nationalist China’s

representative to UN. However, Gross openly admitted that his vote should not be considered as

a veto, because the invitation was a procedural matter. Jiang maintained his last-ditch yet futile

opposition.102 With this tactical way, the US actually helped pave the way for a PRC mission to

visit UN and US.

Wu Xiuquan believed that the reason the US acquiesced this invitation resolution was

that Americans hoped to have some direct contact with CCP for two purposes, first, a curiosity

about the possibility of Chinese intervention at the time when UN forces had landed in Inchon

99 “Foreign Minister Zhou Enali Telegram to UN Secretary-general Lie”, August 30, 1950, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, p. 142. 100 UN Security Council Resolution of September 29, 1950. A scanned full text of the original print version can be found at UN official website: http://www.un.org/en/sc/documents/resolutions/1950.shtml 101 “Peiping Is Invited to Council Hearing”, New York Times, September 30, 1950. 102 Ibid..

and were prepared to cross the 38th to eliminate Pyongyang regime; and second, to set Moscow and Beijing at loggerheads.

But although they believed the Americans were allowing their visit due to ulterior motives, the Chinese Communist leadership was nonetheless determined to send a delegation.

The PRC government accepted the invitation. On October 23, Zhou cabled Trygve Lie, the

Swedish UN secretary general that he had named a delegation of nine, headed by Wu Xiuquan,

Chief of the USSR and Eastern European division in PRC’s Foreign Ministry, with Qiao

Guanhua as the adviser, to represent Communist China at the United Nations Security Council's forthcoming discussion on Taiwan.

2.2 Motivation of the Delegation

First of all, this delegation would work only as temporary mission invited by the UN to participate in debates on a specific issue, rather than as a permanent representative to the organization. This type of participation meant anything but any formal reorganization of the PRC by U.N., which had been one of the top priorities of both the PRC and the Soviet Union since the founding of the regime. The Soviet Union went so far for this goal that its ambassador to United

Nations, Jacob Malik, started to boycott the Security Council on January 13 to protest the

Council’s failure in expelling Nationalist China’s representative. This boycott ended without any result on August 1 1950, when Mailk returned the council in frustration. The furious Soviet representative paralyzed the Security Council meetings in his capacity as the rotated chairman of the Council in August.

Under such terms, sending a delegation was the result of the combination of both Soviet and Chinese considerations and calculations. For the Soviets, they were desperate for a close

ally in the United Nations where they found themselves in an indifferent if not hostile environment. It was not uncommon that Soviet proposals were defeated by a vast majority of the members states, to such an extent that Soviets claimed that the UN had degenerated to a voting machine manipulated by the U.S. The Soviets need for Communist China’s participation became more immense in the context of the Korean War, even at the cost of temporarily suspending the question of China’s representation.

From the perspective of Soviets, the PRC’s participation in accusing the United States of aggression in Taiwan served three goals. First of all, it was useful for the Russians in their attempt to shift the international media’s focus from Korea to Taiwan, so as to alleviate the pressure that the Soviets felt in defending their North Korean ally, who was difficult to defend because the UN had labeled it as the aggressor guilty of initiating the war. Taiwan, on the other hand, was a relatively easier issue for Soviets to take advantage of, because the American policy of “neutralization of the Taiwan Strait,” which President Truman proclaimed by sending the 7th

Fleet t to that area, was not authorized or approved by any UN resolution. Therefore Soviet accusation of American intervention of Chinese civil war and invaded Chinese territory was not a difficult sell compared with Soviet defense of North Korea. Secondly, even if the Security

Council did not approve the Soviet Union’s arguments with regards to the American intervention in the Taiwan Strait, it could be utilized instead as an effective means of propaganda to attack the hypocrisy and double standard that the United States showed in this Far East foreign policy.

Even if this propaganda achieved limited results in affecting the audience in the West, it could definitely prove its strength in mobilizing Soviet domestic populace to join the war efforts in aiding Northern Korean to expel the “American Imperialists” from their country.

From the perspective of the Chinese communists, it was also painful to accept this

arrangement orchestrated by Soviets, because, given the temporary nature of this participation, it

meant the defeat of China’s previous efforts in fighting for admission to the UN. Nevertheless,

the recent events in East Asia did create an urgent need for the CCP to express its opinions in the

UN even at the cost of the postponing the recognition issue. The Inchon landing on September

15 became a turning point that eventually made the already-worn-out North Korean military collapse at an astonishing pace. This dramatically deepened the worries and anxieties of the leaders in Beijing. This psychological change is evident in the telegrams that Zhou sent to the

UN. In the first one dated September 16, Zhou still placed two requests together, namely, the issue of full admission of PRC and the PRC’s participation in discussion of the alleged American invasion and bombing of Chinese territory.103 A few days later, in a telegram to UN Secretary

General Lie, on September 24, Zhou dropped his first request; he only demanded that the UN

“admit the representatives of my government to express our opinions and participate in

meetings” on the PRC’s accusations of American invasion of Chinese air space and the property

and human loss due to its bombing.104

This policy adjustment was likely a response to the General Assembly’s decision made

on September 19 to postpone the Chinese representation issue by setting up a special committee

to make a recommendation to the Assembly. The Beijing leadership believed that this decision

was orchestrad by United States in order to prevent the PRC from having any voice in the

imminent discussion of Far East issues. In their eyes, the United States had taken advantage of

103 “Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai Letter to UN Security Council Chairman Jebb and UN Secretary-general Lie”, Sept. 16, 1950, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, p. 161. In this telegram and previous telegrams, Zhou maintained, “the Central people’s government of PRC is the sole legal representative of Chinese people.” This sentence was dropped in the telegram in Sep. 24. 104 “Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai Letter to UN Security Council Chairman Jebb and UN Secretary-general Lie”, Sept. 24, 1950, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, Pp. 180-182.

the PRC’s insistence of linking these two matters together. Faced with this new setback, Zhou

found his previous position unrealistic. Since the participation in the UN debates had become the

top priority of the PRC’s foreign policy, Zhou had to make a painful compromise, agreeing to

send a delegation even without achieving legal recognition of his government by UN.

From the relevant archives and memoirs, the purpose of Wu Xiuquan’s delegation could

be summarized as: first, to provide direct diplomatic support to the Soviet Union in the United

Nations; second, to accuse the Americans of invasion of the Chinese territory of Taiwan; third, to

create a propaganda campaign to elicit support from the “peace loving” people around the world

to condemn US invasion in Asia; fourth, to mobilize domestic popular support for the war efforts.

The last one was mentioned repeatedly in Zhou’s speeches in those months. For example, he

pointed out a proportion of Chinese population had such mentalities as “devotion to America,

worship of America, fear of America, and underestimate of Chinese and Korean strengths,”

which had become an major obstacle of the War mobilization.105 Hence, the goal of Communist wartime propaganda, as Zhou indicated in one of directives of CCPCC, was to remove these mentalities and replace with attitudes of “hatred, despise and derision of American imperialism.”106

2.3 Preparation and Departure

From October 23 to November 14, the main task of the delegation, according to Wu, was

to prepare a speech for the Security Council and to collect and translate relevant materials. To

draft the speech was the most important task, and it was the result of the efforts of Qiao Guanhua,

another member of the delegation who was well-known for his literary talents and romantic

105 Zhou en lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976 1949-1976), October 21, 1950, vol. 1, p. 87. 106 Ibid., October 26, 1950, vol. 1, p. 89.

personality, and Zhang Wentian, a Soviet trained former top CCP leader who was appointed as

the future PRC representative to UN and who was talented in theoretical analysis and writing.107

This statement was “drafted based on the principles set up by the Central Committee of the

Party,” and was focused on the rebuttal of all kinds of opinions regarding “the uncertainty of

Taiwan status.” 108 The speech was then revised and approved by Mao and Zhou. We will

analyze this speech later.

In retrospect, it appears that the main problem of the preparation process was that the

delegation put too much effort into drafting the speech and failed to pay attention to other issues,

especially how to respond to negotiation offers from the West and how to deal with diplomats

and the press beyond the Soviet bloc. The lack of preparation for those two questions led to the

awkwardness and passivity of the delegation in most occasions during its sojourn in UN

headquarters in Lake Success, New York. Moreover, the delegation decided to adopted an evading/shunning strategy in dealing with PRC’s intervention in the Korean War in order to avoid a slide into open warfare with the US--throughout the Korean War, regular PLA units

fought under the name of “Chinese Volunteers,” an idea that probably was suggested by the

Soviets. Instead, the delegation planned to focus on the question of American aggression on

Taiwan in order to alleviate the Western pressure on North Korea and the Soviet Union, and also

to arouse international sympathies for the PRC’s presumably valid claims on Taiwan. These two

strategies later turned out to be largely ineffective.

On November 14, the delegation left Beijing for New York via multiple connections in

the Soviet Union and other European countries. Wu felt nervous about his mission. We can find

107 Cheng, Zhongyuan 程中原 Zhang Wentian zhuan (Biography of Zhang Wentian 张闻天传) （Beijing: Dang dai Zhong guo chu ban she， 1993）Pp. 653-654 108 Ibid., 654

traces of this anxiety in his memoir where, for example, he says that “we knew the burden of our

mission, so our minds were not tranquil at all.”109 Wu also admitted the lack of diplomatic

experience among CCP diplomats: “how to conduct face to face struggles at the forum rather

than the battlefield, with the number one imperialist state then still powerful and arrogant. This is

a totally new issue for ourselves and for our country. ”110 He was right: he and his comrades

were going to face a powerful and cunning adversary, and it would a demanding task for them

due to their lack of experience. Yet they were fortunate to have a caring supervisor, namely,

Zhou Enlai, who kept such a close eye on the delegation to an extent that otherwise may be

regarded as unnecessary. For instance, in a telegram to Wu on November 17, Zhou reminded

them to, “make sure your speech manuscript be kept in secrecy to avoid any leaks to expose our

intentions. Make sure to report to me whenever you can about your travel.”111

2.4 Arrival

After ten day’s travel, the first CCP delegation to the UN arrived at New York

International Airport early on November 24. They were greeted by United Nations officials and

later by Jacob Malik, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, and other Soviet and Eastern European

delegates to the UN. Wu did not answer any questions from the press but made a prepared

statement, which was surely approved in advance by Zhou. In a speciously friendly yet

threatening tone, the statement conveyed a least three key messages. First, it evaded the topic of

the Korean War, not to mention CCP intervention, and stressed that its mission was only about

the American aggression on Taiwan. Second, it demanded in a vaguely threatening way that the

109 Wu, Hui yi yu huai nian (Memoirs) , p. 258. 110 Ibid. 259. 111 Zhou, “Telegram to UN Mission about the Security and Protection of Secrets,”, November 17, 1957, in Zhou Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), Vol. 3, p. 514.

PRC’s complaint be fairly treated, since “it will be helpful to peace and security in the Pacific and in Asia.” Third, it sent greetings to American people by stressing the friendship between the two countries, with a purpose to differentiate the people from the ruling class, a typical communist strategy.112

On the next day, November 25, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (CPV) launched its

“Second Offensive” in Korea. Within a few days, the Chinese not only reversed the UN

northward drive in central and western North Korea, but also devastated several South Korean

divisions, tore up the US Second Division and forced the rest of the UN units to rapidly

withdraw southwards to escape destruction. The timing seemed to be perfectly orchestrated in

accordance to Wu’s landing in New York in order to attack in both fronts.113

2.5 UNSC Debates

November 28 was a historical date in Sino-US relations, when the delegates of the two

countries launched their offensives against each other on the floor of the Security Council. Both

speeches were well-prepared and full of enmity and anger.114 Warren Austin, American

representative to UN, started with a blunt question, “Will there be peace or war in the Far East?”

He first reported the grim situation in Korea where “Chinese Communist armed forces totaling

more than 200,000 men are now engaged in North Korea,” where they had repulsed the UN

forces, so that “it now appears doubtful that the war in Korea can be quickly concluded.” He

112 The text of this short statement can be found in “Peiping Delegation to UN Arrives” , Nov. 25, 1950, The New York Times. 113 See Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life) , Nov. 22 to Dec. 1, 1950. pp 450-452. Zhou, “Telegram to Wu”, Nov. 26, 1950, in Zhou, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), vol. 3, p. 550. 114 The full texts of the two speeches could be found in both United Nations Official Records, and New York times. UN Security Council, 5th Year, 526th and 527th meetings, November 28, 1950, Official Records, Lake Success, New York. The New York Times, November 29, 1950, pp. 14, 15, 16., .

accused Chinese intervention of being in defiance of the collective will of the majority of UN

members who passed the resolution for aiding the South Korea to restore “peace and

security.” 115He then argued that Chinese intervention was not in “the interests of Chinese

people” but rather a part of “the great Russian power.”

Moreover, he launched a moral attack on the “Chinese Reds” in that the intervention had

betrayed the friendship and goodwill of US government and its people toward China in the past

half century. Austin went on to conduct an exhaustive review the history of the Open Door

policy, America’s intervention in the matter of Japan’s “21 Demands” during WWI, vast

economic aid, and medical and educational efforts, noting that “one-eighth of all the college

graduates in China have received education at one or more of the thirteen colleges established by

American Protestant missions.”116 He also harshly attacked the term “volunteers,” which he said

was only a pretext for regular Chinese aggression.

Then he moved on to Taiwan issue. He denied there was any American aggression on

Taiwan arguing that the US had “no combat ground or air forces on Formosa,” that the marine

blockade was only for neutralizing the strait to prevent any attack from either side, and that the

US government promised that “this action in no way compromises the future status of

Formosa.”117

Then, in a style similar to that of a policeman questioning a suspect, Austin raised 20

questions to Mr. Wu on the Communist government's intentions regarding Korea and Formosa,

such as:

How many Chinese Communist troops had entered Korea and were there now? What was

115 UN Security Council, 5th Year, 526th meeting, November 28, 1950, Official Records (Lake Success, New York), p. 13.. 116 Ibid. Pp. 18-20. 117 Ibid. 19

the organization of these troops? How had they been organized, trained and equipped as a disciplined fighting force? In what "voluntary" manner had their supplies been organized, shipped and distributed? 118

As tough as he could be, nevertheless, Austin opened the door for negotiation:

The United Nations way with disputes is to seek every means of settling them peacefully, through mediation, conciliation, and agreement by negotiation. The United Nations has not hesitated in the past and does not hesitate now to give assurances of its peaceful intensions.119

Furthermore, Austin did not propose any resolution backing up his charges of Chinese aggression against Korea in the Security Council. He also did not suggest that he would ask the

General Assembly to authorize the use of armed force against China, where it was still questionable that a two-thirds majority could be obtained in support of such. And by using the term “mediation,” Austin gave some non-allied countries a hint that the US expected this kind of interaction. As things developed India would emerge as one of the most active countries in the effort to mediate between Wu and the US government. India’s interest in playing this role was due to complicated reasons, including its concern about the status of Tibet and a desire to enhance India’s image among the newly independent countries of the Third World.

Wu began with the Korean issue. In response to Austin’s accusation that China was committing "open and notorious" aggression in Korea, Wu, using the tactic of evasion that we mentioned earlier, replied that he “will of course not participate” in any discussion of the

"Complaint of Aggression Against the Republic of Korea," as submitted by the United States, under which General Douglas MacArthur, then CINCUNC, had reported on November 7 about the intervention of Communist China's forces. His reasoning was obviously weak: there was not

“the slightest resemblance” between the American complaint and what Zhou had promised. He

118 Ibid., 21. 119 Ibid., 22.

cited Zhou’s cablegram dated on November 11 to Lie, saying that Chinese delegation “may

raise at the same time the accusation against armed intervention in Korea by the United States

Government,” yet Zhou made no promise whatsoever to discuss MacArthur’s report.120

According to a later directive to Wu, the purpose of this stand was to avoid putting the PRC in

the position of being questioned as “a defendant.”121

Then Wu turned to the question of China’s representation at the UN. He was ferocious in his attacks on Chinese Nationalist Government, referring to it as the “Kuomintang reactionary remnant clique,” arguing that it had been defeated by the People’s Liberation Army and

“disowned by the people of China.” Therefore, the PRC should be regarded as the sole legitimate government of the whole of China. Noting that “Owing to the manipulation and obstruction of

United States government, the United Nations still refuses our lawful delegates,” he reiterated that PRC would not “recognize any action by the Security Council, particularly regarding Asia, as long as KMT still” held China's seat in the United Nations.122 This stance was in line with

Soviet policy.

Wu then spent the greatest portion of his speech in addressing two issues concerning

Taiwan. The first one was to prove that Taiwan was an "inalienable part of Chinese sovereignty,” as a rebuttal to the “uncertain status of Taiwan,” a claim that President Truman made in his June

27 announcement. In doing this he traced the status of Taiwan from Chinese ancient history

through the Cairo and Potsdam declarations, and lastly reminded the audience that the United

120 UN Security Council, 5th Year, 527th meeting, November 28, 1950, Official Records (Lake Success, New York), p. 2 121 This tactic was clearly revealed in one of Zhou’s telegram to Wu on December 7. Zhou directed that Wu should not participate any debates that were going to criticize Communist China, such as the US-proposed “the Intervention of Central Government of PRC on Korea”, but only participate the meetings that were pro-China or pro-Soviet, such as “ Complaint of Armed Aggression of US on Taiwan”, in which China was the “plaintiff” (yuangao 原告). See Zhou, Manuscripts, Vol. 3, p. 599 122 Ibid., 3-4.

Nations had no jurisdiction there despite the absence of a peace treaty with Japan, and that

therefore, the UN did not have the authority to decide the future of Taiwan. 123 He announced

that the Communist government would not recognize any United Nations decision regarding the

island.

The second one is the main theme of Wu’s speech: American aggression against China,

Taiwan and other regions in Far East. Wu based all his narratives and accusations on this

premise. As he said:

In the entire history of Chin’s foreign relations, notwithstanding the fact that the people of United States and China have always maintained friendly relations, the American imperialists have always, in their relations with China, been the cunning aggressor. The American imperialists have never been the friends of the Chinese people. They have always been the enemies of the Chinese people. However shamelessly the American imperialists claim to be friends of the Chinese people, the historical record which distinguishes friend from foe cannot be altered.124

Building on this premise, Wu then recounted a history of Sino-US relations characterized,

not by friendship (as Austin had suggested) but by American aggression. The “open door

policy,” “equal opportunity,” and “vast economic aid” were now portrayed as aggression in one

form or another. Wu particularly emphasized to the audience that the American government had

armed the “Chiang Kai-shek reactionary clique” to kill “millions of Chinese people.” Then he

attacked the American “armed invasion” on Taiwan. As a rebuttal to Austin’s claim that there

was no American aggression on Taiwan, in a style similar to that of Mao Zedong, Wu said,

Very well! Where, then, have the United States Seventh Fleet and the Thirteenth Air Force gone? Can it be that they have gone to the planet Mars? No. The United States Seventh Fleet and the Thirteenth Air Force have not gone elsewhere. They are in Taiwan.125

123 He said, “Long before the-United -states achieved its independence, Taiwan had already become an inseparable part of- the territory of China.” See his speech, p. 5. 124 Ibid., 9. 125 Ibid.,

Wu continued his diatribe to warn the audience that the aggression on Taiwan was only

part of an American scheme to conquer Far East, including Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and

Japan. Therefore, he called for international revolutions across East and Southeast Asia:

In the course of 55 years, as a result of the victories of the great Socialist October Revolution of the Soviet Union, of the anti-Fascist second World War, and of the great revolution of the Chinese people, all the oppressed nations and peoples of the East have awakened and organized themselves….the hard struggling people Of Japan, the victoriously advancing people of Vietnam, the heroically resisting people of Korea, the people of the Philippines Who have never laid down their arms, and all the oppressed nations and peoples or the East will certainly unite in close solidarity. Yielding neither to the enticements nor to the threats of American imperialism, they will fight dauntlessly on to win the final victory in their struggle for national independence.126

Lastly, Wu returned to the most sensitive Korean issue. He claimed that, “under the pretext of the Korean civil war, which was of its own making, the United States Government launched armed aggression against Korea,” and that this aggression “gravely threatened China’s security.” By citing facts and statistics (in tables) about the American aerial and maritime invasions, Wu explained the PRC’s policy toward Korean War, in which the PRC would not declare war on the UN forces or the United states, but that “volunteers” would be encouraged:

Stirred into righteous anger, they (Chinese people) are volunteering in great numbers to go to the aid of the Korean people...The Chinese People's Government sees no reason whatever to prevent their voluntary departure for Korea.127

With more than 10,000 English words (published in New York Times in more than two

pages on the next day), this lengthy statement cost General Wu more than two hours to finish

reading. In addition to his abusive language, Wu’s voice, according to his memoir and other

accounts, was very loud and filled with anger. Together with his passivity on other occasions,

his image in the press and the general public was “rude,” “arrogant” and “unfriendly.”128

126 Ibid.24 127 Ibid 22. 128 “Wu of China:’ More General than Diplomat’” , Dec. 17, 1950, New York Times.

2.6 Impacts

Wu’s speech did produce great propaganda value, which in turn was exploited by

Communist states in an attempt to stimulate morale among their peoples, which had dropped

due to the setbacks that the North Koreans had experienced after Inchon. It became a very

popular and well-known text in China, especially after part of it was included in middle school

textbooks. The Soviet Union was certainly very satisfied with the performance of their Chinese

comrade for the speech’s fighting spirit and uncompromising attitude. In his memoir, Wu

recalled that Andrey Vyshinsky, the Soviet minster of foreign affairs, once told him that Soviets

often felt isolated in UN since they rarely got supported, so they really wanted to have a great

power ally like China to fight with them shoulder to shoulder in UN.129 It was without doubt that

Wu met Soviet expectations in this regard.

On the other hand, Wu’s speech was very unpopular or even elicited a negative response

among non-Communist countries. According to Wellington Koo, the speech was simply “a piece

of propaganda. Although Wu speaks China, yet his opinions are from the Kremlin.”130 Dean

Rusk, then the assistant secretary of state for Far East Affairs, agreed with Koo, and speculated that the text may have been drafted by Russians, since it was very similar to another speech that

Vyshinsky had delivered to the British House of Commons.131

According to Koo, later on December 11, he happened to meet the Philippine ambassador

to U.S, who told him that “he was totally shocked by the Wu’s speech because Wu mentioned

Philippines frequently” in his agitating a Far East revolution against US imperialism.132

129 Wu, Hui yi yu huai nian（Memoirs）, 275 130 V. K Wellington Koo 顾维钧, Gu wei jun hui yi lu （Memoirs of V.K. Koo 顾维钧回忆录） (Beijing: Zhong hua shu ju, 1983), Vol. VIII, p. 167. 131 Ibid., 168 132 Ibid., 181.

Dean Acheson, Secretary of State Department, who had predicted that China would be another Yugoslavia, was also upset by the speech. In his memoir, he recalled:

The General's presence resulted from an invitation of the Security Council to discuss what it politely termed the "new turn of events" in Korea. He chose instead to join in support of Malik's resolutions condemning American ‘aggression’ in Formosa and Korea.133

President Truman had a much stronger reaction than Acheson. In a meeting with British

Prime Minster Clement Attlee a few days later, he said:

I talked, as strongly as I knew how, about the language the Chinese Reds were using about us at Lake Success and the falsehoods they were spreading. I said their handling of our missionaries and of our consuls was a blot on humanity. There was nothing in getting them admitted to the UN until they changed their ways.134

The outraged Truman clearly showed his anger in press conference on November 30. He pointed out to the press that the attitude of the Chinese Communist delegate gave little present hope for peaceful negotiations, and he clearly told the reporters that in a life and death struggle the United States would not hesitate to use every weapon it possessed, including the atomic bomb.135 His words created widespread concern and anxiety. Europeans hurried to ask the

Truman administration to clarify the message. France openly opposed Truman’s idea and British prime minster Atlee hurried to travel to D.C. to hold a summit with President Truman. Wu and his colleagues were without doubt busy in evaluating the message and reported it back to Zhou

Enlai in Beijing.

On November 29, the Security Council continued the debate on Taiwan and Korean issues. As expected, Soviet ambassador Malik launched another diatribe to reiterate and reinforce the points in Wu’s speech. In a similar tone to that of his Chinese comrade, Malik’s speech was

133 Dean Acheson, Present at the creation: my years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 481 134 Truman, Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 407. 135 “Truman Gives Aim”, New York Times, December 1, 1950.

lengthy and aggressive.136 Austin fought back by saying that, “General Wu misrepresents all this history in his attempts to depict the United States as an aggressor,” and urged the council “to lay

aside for now the fantastic charge of United States aggression against Taiwan and proceed with

the consideration of the Six-Power draft resolution on Korea.”137 France, South Korea, and

Nationalist China expressed the opposite position. General Wu largely kept silent in the whole

process because most of the debates were conducted on Korean issue. Tingfu Jiang, the KMT

representative to UN, tried to repudiate Wu’s claim of American aggression on Taiwan. Jiang

was a well-known historian in the Russo-Chinese relations, educated at Columbia University. He

adopted a rather arrogant tone, saying (in a speech delivered in fluent English), “any elementary

school textbook will tell you that the United States has not held and does not hold a single square

inch of Chinese territory.”138 After hearing these words, Wu could not control his anger and

requested to respond, “I consider that there is absolutely no necessity to give him an answer….I

has serious doubts whether this man who spoke before me is a Chinese himself. The 475 million

great people of China speak a language which, it appears, he does not know.139

November 30 was the voting day for the resolutions. The Western bloc showed a high

level of solidarity and rejected the PRC-proposed, Soviet-sponsored resolutions on Taiwan with

only one vote in favor the (Soviet Union) and one abstention (India). In revenge, the Soviet

Union vetoed the Western six-power proposal calling for withdrawal from Korea of forces aiding

North Koreans.140 So in the end, the debates in the Security Council turned out to be

136 UN Security Council, 5th Year, 528th meeting, November 29, 1950, Official Records (Lake Success, New York), Pp. 15-33. 137 Ibid.. 14.. 138 “Excerpts From Speeches by Tsiang, Wu, Austin and Malik in U.N”, New York Times, November 30, 1950. 139 Ibid. 11 140 UN Security Council, 5th Year, 530th meeting, November 30, 1950, Official Records (Lake Success, New York)

inconclusive.

In a short statement immediately before the Council started voting, General Wu continued his intransigent position, and said that although he had already told the Council that he would not participate in the discussion of the Korean question, Warren Austin, the United States representative, had “very strangely” asked him a number of questions and had “used a threatening tone.” Wu declared that these "threats" did not frighten him and that he still refused to discuss “this so-called complaint.”141

With the end of the three-days of intensive debates at the Security Council, the delegation switched to prepare another speech for the meeting of the Political and Security Committee of the General Assembly where both the PRC and the US had made complaints. The members of the PRC delegation must have felt pressure when they received a telegram from Zhou dated

December 2, in which Zhou expressed his disappointment and concerns regarding both his own performance and that of the delegation:

From the past five sessions of the Security Council, we can see that all procedures were arranged by the manipulation of the American-British bloc. If we do not prepare our speeches in advance, and struggle to take the floor, they won’t give us any chance to talk. In the Security Council, we have lost chances to repudiate Austin and Jebb142 You should start immediately to prepare a comprehensive statement for the Political and Security Committee as a counterattack of the threatening statement by Austin and Jebb, as well as Truman. The statement should not be too long.143

2.7 Cease-fire Arrangement: Private Interactions

In addition to these headaches, the delegation was facing another more pressing issue: how to respond to negotiation feelers from the West? What was the PRC’s stance and attitude on

141 Ibid, 16. 142 Sir Gladwyn Jebb (1900-1996), the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 to 1954. 143 Zhou, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), vol. 3, p. 574.

such mediation and negotiation? What were PRC’s conditions, if any, on an armistice? Because

of the “volunteer” form of Chinese involvement, was it appropriate for PRC’s diplomats to

participate into such talks? If so, to what extent? Was it possible that this was trap or pitfall set

by US in its scheme to label PRC as the aggressor in the coming General Assembly meetings?

The members of the Chinese Communist delegation, and even Zhou Enlai himself, did not yet

have answers for these questions. As late as December 7, in a telegram to Wu, Zhou still

confessed that “regarding the contents of the negotiation, we are still in the process of

consideration. Please allow me to notify you later.”144

The American media, which had been keeping up an intensive coverage since the

delegation arrived in New York, soon detected this awkwardness. As early as November 30, an

article in the New York Times had found that the delegation was very inactive in private

interaction:

(General Wu) has not shown any eagerness to engage in private discussions or negotiations with any delegates from the West. Although the Chinese Communist delegation arrived last Friday, it still has not met privately with any delegation except that of the Soviet Union, so far as is known. Several other Security Council members have sent out feelers for a talk on the crisis which many fear holds a threat of general war, but without results.145

Sir Benegal N. Rau, the Indian representative in the United Nations, was one of few exceptions that Wu was willing to deal with. India maintained a somewhat neutral stance in the

Security Council debates and was very active in the private mediation efforts. Concerns about

Tibet were an important factor in explaining India’s vacillating attitude.146 In reports made to

the State Department, Austin indicates that Rau was actually a voluntary agent of U.S

144 Ibid., 600.

145 “Peiping Delegate Shuns Private Talks with West”, New York Times, November 30, 1950.

146 In an internal report, an American diplomat analyzed the relation of India and Tibet, see “The Ambassador in India (Henderson)• to the Secretary of. State”, January 10, 1950, FRUS, 1950, VI: 272-273.

government in dealing with Chinese delegation. Rau reported his efforts in this regard to Austin

and his assistants on a daily basis. It also appears that Austin appointed Rau and Trygve Lie as

mediators of American interaction with CCP. For instance, in a report to Dean Acheson, Austin

said, “we had informed Rau and Bebler (Yugoslavia) of our willingness to talk with the Beijing

representatives if they desired to express their views on any matters of concern to them and had

also advised Lie to the same effect.”147

With American consent, Rau made continuous efforts to contact Wu, yet the latter declined to meet him at the early days with excuses like time conflict. These frustrations led Rau to tell Austin’s assistant, “He did not believe Chinese Communist delegation were ‘free agents.”148 On December 1, with the initiative coming from the Chinese this time, Rau

eventually had a fifty-minute talk with Wu over the possibility of a peaceful settlement of

Beijing’s intervention in Korea. After the meeting Rau told the press that he had the impression

that the Beijing Government “also would like a peaceful settlement,” and that “I still have

hope.”149 On the same day in the evening, he was warned by Austin in private dinner. Austin

reported:

I expressed hope Rau would be wary of efforts on part of Wu to build up a climate of so- called discussions and that in any statement Rau might make after the meeting he would avoid falling into this familiar trap (Communist propaganda trick). Rau listened intently and throughout nodded his agreement.150

Wu also found himself in an embarrassing situation. With limited authorization from

Beijing, plus his lack of diplomatic experience and political maturity, he had little to offer to the

147 “The United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin) to the Secretary of State”, November 29, 1950, FRUS, 1950, VII: 1255-1257. 148 “The United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin) to the Secretary of State”, November 30, 1950, FRUS, 1950, VII: 1272. 149 “Indian Sees Wu of Red China”, New York Times, December 02, 1950, p. 1. 150 “The United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin) to the Secretary of State”, December 01, 1950, FRUS, 1950, VII: 1289.

mediators, even when the meetings were held in a short and stiff fashion. According to an

observation of the New York Times, “in private talks with perhaps a dozen delegates--talks

initiated in an effort ‘to end the intervention of Communist China,’ General Wu has been equally

tough. All proposals made to him have met the same response: he nodded and agreed to transmit

them to his government.”151

Still, India continued its peace offensive. Three days later, on December 5, thirteen Asian and Arab member states of the UN, headed by Rau, appealed to Communist China and the North

Korean regime to issue an immediate statement that the forces under their control would not cross the 38th Parallel:

We, on behalf of the delegations of Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen to the United Nations consider it our duty at this critical hour earnestly to appeal to the North Korean authorities and the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China immediately to 'declare that it’s not their intention that any forces under their control should cross to the south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel.’ ..Such a declaration will give time for considering what further steps are necessary to resolve the conflicts in the Far East and thus help to avert the danger of another world war.152

In Beijing, Zhou and Mao must have been greatly annoyed by the aggressive speeches by

Austin and his Western allies at Lake Success. While China’s armies were advancing

victoriously in their offensive on the Korean Peninsula, Chinese Communist and Soviets

diplomats were at an obvious inferior disadvantage in combating a temporarily united Western

bloc in the diplomatic sphere. Wu’s speech on 28 November not only failed to create discord

among the US and its satellites, but also seemed to have reinforced their solidarity in fighting

communism. In a telegram to Wu on December 2 (Mao made a few revisions to it before it was

sent out), Zhou urged the delegation to change their tactics in dealing with the Korean War:

151 “No Compromise in UN Diplomacy”, New York Times, Dec. 17, 1950. 152 “13 Nations in Plea”, New York Times, Dec. 6, 1950.

In sum, you should not continue to differentiate Taiwan aggression from Korean aggression. You should not continue to focus on condemning aggression on Taiwan and try to evade Korea in making any direct face-to-face response…Never again, you should now talk about Korea and Taiwan altogether with confidence and convictions, and should prove the illegality of UN resolutions on American aggressions of Korea and Taiwan wherever you can . … You should not be afraid for any negotiations….153

Zhou’s reprimand of course was effective. As Stueck points out, the Chinese delegation

seemed to soften its position. On December 7, Qiao Guanhua asked one Indian delegate that if his government were to halt its troops at the 38th parallel, how could it be assured that the UN

forces would not re-cross that parallel? Indian dealt with this inquiry seriously. Two days later,

after consulting with US delegation, Rau told Wu that the United States was genuinely interested

in a cease-fire, a demilitarized zone, and “further negotiations.” 154Wu replied that Beijing felt

the same way, but he declined to make any further promise.

2.8 Calculations of Moscow and Beijing on the War

Nevertheless, where and how to set the conditions for negotiation was still an unsettled

question. It was more a military question than a political or diplomatic question. The difficulty

of this question was rooted from a least two military factors and one diplomatic factor. The first

one was the capabilities of communist forces. Were the CPV and the KPA strong enough to

drive the UN forces out of the Korean peninsula, or at least, drive them to the south of 38th

parallel? The second factor was the will and determination of leadership in crossing the parallel.

Finally there was the question of whether or not China was willing to bear the consequences of

rejecting the truce offer from the West. The first two factors were most crucial because if

153 Zhou, “Telegram to Wu Xiuquan and Others Concerning Questions of the Lines in the Speeches at the UN General Assembly Political and Security Committee,” in Zhou, Jiang guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC）, Vol. 3, Pp.574-576. 154 Stueck, Korean War, 140.

Communist forces were able to destroy the main divisions of the UN forces and drive them out of Korea, then (as China’s leaders saw it) a domino effect would surely occur, in which domestic chaos, widespread uprisings, world revolutions, and the collapse of the capitalist camp could be expected. If that scenario happened, then neither the Taiwan problem, nor China’s representation at the UN, nor even the rise of the PRC as great power would be an issue.

Historians in China generally take the position that it was in regards to the first factor that

Mao and Stalin made a grave mistake. Both of them overestimated the capabilities of the

Communist forces to an unrealistic and dangerous level. Mao’s optimism was clearly reflected in a telegram to Peng Dehuai on November 28,when the CPVs’ second Campaign seemed to have achieved great success:

Our current task is to concentrate our 42nd, 38th, 40th, and 39th armies to destroy the main strengths of American 1st Cavalry Division, 2nd, and 25th Divisions. If these three divisions are crushed down, then the whole situation would be very favorable to us….42nd army should eliminate the 1st cavalry division by its own strengths, 38th , 40th, and 39th armies… for….….the 2nd Division and the 25th Division of American 9th army corps.155

Actually, as the war developed, it turned out that the CPV was not able to annihilate even one full American brigade in one single instance of combat, let alone a whole division. It was true that during the Second Campaign, the CPVA inflicted huge losses on the UN forces and forced them to retreat southwards to 38th parallel, but Mao and Zhou failed to notice the fact that most of those retreats were planned in order to preserve the UN’s main strength for a later counterattack as indicted by Peng in one of his reports. Both Mao and Zhou were infected with a severe case of military over-optimism., in which both of whom enjoyed in using terms such as

“debacle,” or “ horrible defeats”(惨败) to describe UN forces, and in which they failed to warn

155 Mao, Jian guo yi lia wen gao (Manuscripts of Mao since the Founding of PRC）, Vol. I: 689.

their generals to keep cautious of the possible American scheme behind these retreats.156

Stalin also approved the plan of crossing parallel. According to a report of Andrei

Gromyko about his meeting with Wang Jiaxiang, the Chinese ambassador to Soviet Union,

Wang asked if Chinese volunteers should across the 38th parallel. Gromyko answered, “Given

the current situation in Korea, it is very appropriate to be ‘striking while the iron is hot’.” Wang

agreed, and added that “American soldiers are very poor fighters. Chinese comrades think that

they are much weaker than Japanese soldiers.”157 Although Gromyko emphasized that he was

expressing his personal opinion, under the Soviet system, we can assume that he was conveying

Stalin’s opinion.

Under the influence of this optimism, Zhou Enlai was able to draft PRC’s five conditions

for truce in Korea:

1) withdrawal of all foreign troops from Korea; 2), withdrawal of American troops from the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan, 3), Korean question should be solved by Korean people themselves, 4), admission of PRC into UN and exclusion of Chiang Kai- shek’s representatives, 5), convention of a conference of foreign ministers of the four powers to prepare the Japanese peace treaty.158

These were very severe conditions, tantamount to a demand for surrender from the UN

side. The purpose was clear: Communist forces would continue to advance and would not halt at

the parallel.

156 Such as, Zhou, Enlai 周恩来. Jian guo yi lai zhou en lai wen gao（Manuscripts of Zhou Enlai since the Founding of PRC 建国以来周恩来文稿）(Beijing: Zhong Yang Wen Xian Chu Ban She, 2008), Vol. 3:575 157 Gromyko, “Memo of the Meeting with Wang Jiaxiang,” December 5, 1950, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),pp. 635-636. 158 Roshchin, “Telegram Concerning Chinese Government’s Conditions of the Cease Fire in Korea”, December 7, 1950, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives), p. 639. The same telegram is also found in Weathersby’s work with a different title, “ciphered telegram from Roshchin conveying message from Zhou Enlai to Soviet Government,” in Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War”, in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Winter 1995, p. 52.

After the draft was ready, Zhou submitted it to Mao for approval, but Mao suggested

delaying the release of these conditions in order to attain a better position in the coming

negotiation.159 Zhou also sent the draft to Stalin in Moscow for advice. Stalin replied in a few

hours. He agreed that those conditions must be met before a truce was possible. Nevertheless, he

strongly suggested to Zhou that it was better to ask Wu to solicit the conditions of the adversary

side first rather than disclose these conditions directly. He warned that the mediator (India) was

actually the agent of the US, so Chinese delegates should not be too candid to them and should

not expose Chinese bottom line too early. “If the US wants to take advantage of China’s five

conditions, it can condemn this draft as an insult to the UN resolution. We should not give the

Americans such opportunity. ”160 We can also find this kind of admonishing tone in several of

Stalin’s telegrams to Mao.161

2.9 American-British Summit

Back at Lake Success, and now armed with the new directives from Beijing, the Chinese

Communist delegation tried to adopt a more flexible and open-minded style of negotiation, and

tried to participate more in social gatherings in the diplomatic circle beyond Communist bloc.

For example, on December 4, four members of the Chinese delegation including Wu and Qiao,

accepted the invitations to a dinner hosted Mr. Trygve Lie at his house. Representatives from

four nations, Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan and Sweden were invited. Wu himself attended a

159 According to Zhou, Mao’s phrase is “拖而不摊”, see Zhou, Manuscripts, Vol. 3, p. 606. 160 Stalin, “Telegram via Gromko to Roshchin about Soviet Approval of Chinese Government’s Cease-fire conditions,” in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives) , vol. II, Pp. 641-642. The same telegram is included in Weathersby’s work with a slightly different title, “Gromyko to Roshchin transmitting message from Filippov(Stalin)to Zhou Enlai” in Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War”, in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Winter 1995, Pp.52-53. 161 See the correspondence between Stalin and Mao during the period from May 1951 to June 1951, when Stalin was annoyed by Mao’s suggestion of the use of encirclement tactic by retreating back to the north of Pyongyang, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives)..

quietedinner hosted by Lie, Rau, and others. According to one news report, “The other guests

watched him as closely as courtesy permitted and remarked afterward that he seemed quite at

ease in diplomatic surroundings.”162 However, one guest, Sven Grafstrom of Sweden, was

much more critical. According to another report by Austin:

Mr. Grafstrom's conversation with General Wu at Secretary General Lie's dinner demonstrated, conclusively, to Mr. Grafstrom's mind, that Wu was only a megaphone for Moscow and acting the party line under instructions without any will of his own. Grafstrom spent the major part of his time talking to Wu through an interpreter and found that his approach was no different from that displayed in the Security Council. It was futile to expect anything to come out of such talks. 163

Yet all of these personality traits and style issues were less important than what top

American leaders and their British counterparts decide to do in the course of the war in Korea.

After five days of intensive conferences, President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee of Britain

concluded that the fight in Korea needed to be continued in order to contain the Chinese

communists. In their communiqué on December 8, they announced,

The military capabilities of the two countries should be increased as rapidly as possible; The two countries should expand the production of arms, which can be used by the forces of all the free nations that are joined together in common defense. Furthermore, the two countries should continue to work out arrangements to the common defense.164

This communiqué was clearly an announcement of their continuation of war in Korea.

As a following step, on December 10, General George Marshall, Secretary of Defense, disclosed

in a Senate meeting that President Truman was "seriously considering" the declaration of a state

of national emergency, hinted that a proclamation by the President should be issued as soon as

possible. Such a proclamation would automatically invoke many extraordinary powers to the

President to lay the ground for full mobilization of American industrial and manpower

162 “Private talk Held with Chinese Reds”, December 5, 1950, New York Times. 163 Henry S. Villard ( Adviser to the United States UN Delegation), “Memorandum of Conversation” , December 8, 1950, FRUS, 1950, Vol. 7, pp. 1466-1467. 164 “Communiqué on Talks between Truman and Attlee”, New York Times, December 9, 1950.

resources for a war.

At this point both belligerent sides had made up their minds to continue the fight in the

battlefield. Therefore, any negotiation and mediation had to be put on the back burner.

Later that day, On December 10, the delegation cabled Zhou that they planned to leave

New York after the end of the Political and Security Committee sessions that were scheduled to

finish on December 13 or December 14. On December 12, Zhou replied back and approved the

idea of leaving after the sessions. Yet again, he seemed dissatisfied with the work of the

delegation, so he provided detailed suggestions, in which a flexibility was the key principle: “the

departure date should be on the third day after the meeting is finished, on the second day, you

should hold a press conference. If you find any need to stay longer, you may stay for more a few

days. So, you should not release the date of departure in advance.”165

2.10 The End of Wu Mission

Although the 3-man Cease-fire Group worked smoothly with the UNC in Korea, its contact with the PRC proved to be rough and futile. On December 16, Nastrollah Enterzam,

President of the Group, sent a letter by hand to General Wu to notify him of the latest UN ceasefire resolution and, and requested, “for this purpose, we desire to see you at your earliest convenience, and we should be grateful to be grateful to know when a meeting can be arranged.”166 In order to express the sincerity their invitation and the urgent nature of this matter,

on the same day, the President transmitted a request to the PRC through the Swedish Embassy in

Beijing that' “Ambassador Wu be instructed to stay on in New York and discuss with the group

165 Zhou, “Telegram to Wu and Others Concerning the Question of the Date of the Return of the UN Mission,” in Zhou, Jian guo yi lai wen gao （Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC）, Vol. 3, p. 631. 166 “Truce Committee Report”, in “U.N. Cease-Fire Project and Statements”, in New York Times, January 12, 1951.

the possibility of arranging cease-fire.” Furthermore, he offered that the group would visit

Beijing if Chinese wanted, “we are prepared to discuss cease-fire arrangements with your

Government or its representative either here or elsewhere, as would be mutually convenient.”167

On December 19, in waiting for Zhou’s reply, the group sent another telegram to Zhou in order to clarify the relations of the truce and the following political negotiations. It assured him that, “once a cease-fire arrangement has been achieved, the negotiations ….should proceed at once.” Meanwhile, it demanded that, “to make that possible a 'cease-fire' arrangement must be put into effect.”168 Such assurance would never work, because it was simply a reiteration of the principle of “cease-fire first, negotiation second,” a model that Zhou strongly opposed and would never accept.

Beijing bluntly rejected this overture. Wu himself indicated that he had no authority to deal with the group.169 He declined to make any contact with them in public or in private. The formal reason for his stance was explained in a reply by Zhou on December 21, which said that the PRC representative had neither participated in nor approved the resolution of December 14, and that PRC government therefore would regard it as “illegal, null and void,” and would not abide by it. His government could not instruct its representative, General Wu, to continue to conduct negotiations with the group created by that illegal resolution.

In addition, Zhou provided the reason for the recall of General Wu from New York: “the

United Nations General Assembly was declared adjourned. He was still not given the opportunity to speak. . . . Under such circumstances, the Central People's Government deems that there is no more any necessity for General Wu and his staff to remain at Lake Success and

167 Ibid. 168 Ibid.. 169 “y”, New York Times, Dec.18, 1950.

has therefore instructed them to start their homeward journey on December 19.”

On December 15, for the first time, the delegation called a press conference. Sitting flanked by his aides, Wu faced some 100 reporters in the Security Council chamber. He read from a hand-written four-page text in Chinese to pronounce the PRC’s opinions. The statement had been carefully prepared ahead of time and revised by Mao and Zhou. Zhou had added a long paragraph which became the essential part of Wu’s text in the press conference. There are no

known telegrams to show if Zhou had had any contacts with Stalin about this statement, yet it is

possible that they may have had some type of communication in how to deal with thirteen-

country proposal and the 3-man Cease-fire Committee.

In his statement, Wu accused the United States of conducting an ongoing policy of

aggression in Taiwan and Korea. As proof, he cited President Truman's recent comments on the

atomic bomb, the Attlee-Truman communiqué, and General Marshall’s indication of a

proclamation of a national emergency.

Wu further insisted that the idea of "cease-fire first" in Korea was an American plot to

“tie the hands” of the Korean Communists and the “Chinese volunteers.” In his view, “Chiang

Kai-shek set traps like this many times in China with help from George Marshall” in 1946 and

1947, so Chinese people were familiar with this sort of trick. He charged, “We wish to unmask

such traps of the American ruling circles to the peace-loving people of the whole world.”170

What Wu could promise to the world, he said was that his government was “willing to try

to advise the Chinese volunteers to bring to an early conclusion the military operations which

they have been forced to undertake.”171 According to Zhou’s Manuscripts, the phrase “to try to

170 “Text of Peiping Envoy's Statement”, New York Times, December 17, 1950. 171 Ibid..

advise” was added by Mao, which made the promise even more loose and flexible.172 Since an

immediate truce was impossible, Wu thus evaded the question of whether the Chinese would

withdraw their troops. Wu did not take questions from the journalists, nor did his aides. When

they were asked for an explanation of the statement, they simply shrugged.

The White House’s well-prepared response came swiftly. On December 16, President

Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight what he called “Communist

imperialism.” The proclamation stated that it was necessary “that the military, naval, air and

civilian defenses of this country be strengthened as speedily as possible to the end that we may

be able to repel any and all threats against our national security.”173 The emergency proclamation

granted the president additional executive powers and allowed him to institute a number of price

and wage controls intended to strengthen American defense forces. It indicated that US was

determined to continue to fight even it was escalate into a much larger conflict.

Wu determined to fly home. On December 19, he met briefly with Rau and Lie

respectively to say farewell and thanked them for their efforts and assistance to the delegation

during their twenty-six-day sojourn in Lake Success. Then they left their suite at the Hotel

Waldorf-Astoria for Idlewild Airport. There, Wu read a written statement to press. Aside from

complaining that “our peace proposal to stop the war was rejected by the Anglo-American ruling

circles without due consideration,” the rest of his statement was mild and soft. Beginning by

wishing the American people a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, he said, “We are not in

despair. We shall continue to strive for peace.” Then he acknowledged the friendship of the

peoples in the two countries, and called on the “peace-loving American people” and peoples

172 Zhou, “Telegram to Wu about the Revisions of the Statement at Press Conference”, December 14, 1950, in Zhou, Jiang guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), Vol. 3, p. 643. 173 “Truman’s Proclamation” , The New York Times, December 17, 1950.

around the world to oppose the aggression and the war to restore peace.174 After saying farewell

to Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Jacob Malik and delegates from Eastern European countries,

together with more than one ton of luggage (which required that they pay more than $1, 600 in

excess baggage charges), the nine-man delegation boarded the plane to depart for London, then

Prague, Moscow, and finally, Beijing.175

2.11 A Review of the Mission

As mentioned earlier, in his reply to the Political Committee on December 22, Zhou

provided his two reasons for the recall of Wu’s delegation: the illegality of cease-fire group, and

the adjournment of the meetings of the Political Committee. A deep analysis about the reason,

the timing, and impacts of this recall, and broadly, the performance of the delegation, is

necessary and important in our understanding of PRC diplomacy in this period.

To begin with, the first reason for the recall was seriously undiplomatic and non-strategic.

As a tactic, it may have been reasonable to reject the legality of the cease-fire resolution and of

the three-man group it authorized. Yet it was less than convincing for the Chinese to refer to this

“illegality” as the reason for the recall, because to do so meant that the PRC had shut the door

any direct diplomacy with the UN, including the Arab-Asian group and the West. From the

perspective of Chinese national interests, the continued presence of a delegation at the UN

would have been tremendously helpful in many ways, including intelligence collection, effective

communication, conduct of negotiations, and improving China’ image. Wu’s memoir indicates

that the Chinese were desperate for information and knowledge about American society and

174 “Wu Flies Home After Accusing UN’” , The New York Times, Dec. 20, 1950. 175 Ibid.. Wellington Koo was also astonished with tonnage of the luggage, and teased that the Delegation must have been very rich and squandered their money in buying many “good stuff”. See his memoir, Vol. VIII, p. 185. According Wu, they did buy many goods, including a few encyclopedias. See his memoir, p. 275

culture, not to mention the latest political and diplomatic currents. They even purchased a few sets of encyclopedia, which were a bulk of their return-home luggage. If they had continued to stay in New York, they could have made more progress toward these goals, particularly considering that they had only scanty information about the US at the time. In addition, direct communication and interaction with diplomats from different countries and the American public at large would have helped to increase the outside world’s understanding of the PRC by decreasing misunderstandings and prejudice that were rampant in the West about China.

Wu’s delegation was regarded by UN diplomatic circles as an attempt to establish a direct channel of contact between Beijing and Washington. The recall of the delegation meant the end of that effort. The lack of direct contacts between the capitals had tremendous impact on the authority and the communication and hence the effectiveness of the deterrence or coercive diplomacy on both sides. Contacts via third parties, whether India or Sweden, were problematic in terms of the accuracy and authority of the messages being conveyed. For example, Zhou repeatedly asked Indian ambassador K. M. Panikkar to convey China’s warnings to the US about the possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea. Yet Mr. Panikkar was an interlocutor distrusted in the United States. Part of Zhou’s problem was that in Beijing he did not have many options to choose from. If Wu had stayed in New York, he could have given Zhou a broader range of possibilities and choices of ways to contact Washington, and vice versa.

American diplomats did have some expectation that they would be able to set up channels of communication through contacts with General Wu. According the report of Austin, his assistant Gross had advised ambassadors of Britain, France and India to the UN to transfer a message to Communists delegates: if “they [Chinese] desired to express their views on any

matters of concern to them,” then the Americans were willing to talk directly with them.176

According to one memorandum by CIA, on the eve of the arrival of the delegation, Washington expected that the Communist delegation would be likely to reach some kind of diplomatic settlement on Korea as long as such arrangement was reach outside UNSC.177 Even after Wu’s aggressive speech at the Security Council and the intensification of conflicts in the battlefield, there was no clear indication that the US wanted to drive the delegation out of New York. From the standpoint of China’s interests, having Wu stay in New York would have provided more options or channels through which to exert China’s influence and persuasion than Zhou had in

Beijing.

The second reason for the recall of delegation was China’s belief that the Americans had purposely postponed the UN meetings in order to deprive the Communist delegates of the right to speak. this belief is stated clearly in both Zhou’s statement and Wu’s memoir. Their accusation is not supported by the currently available sources. Instead, according to a September decision by the general committee, the fifth UN General Assembly was due to meet on

December 15 to complete its work in order for the delegates to return home for the Christmas holiday season. The delegates, including Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky hurried to leave for home the next day. It was difficult to claim that this was an American plot. Meanwhile, the three-man cease-fire group continued to work in order to seek a satisfactory ground for both sides to achieve a truce. In addition, the Security Council discussion on Korea and Taiwan issues was also suspended for the reason that the Soviets had vetoed a resolution approved by most members and according to newly adopted Resolution for Peace, these issues would have to be

176 “The US Representative at the United Nations (Au8tin) to the Secretary of State”, FRUS, 1950, Vol. 7, 1257.

177 ““Memorandum by the CIA” , FRUS, 1950, Vol. 7, 1222.

transferred to the General Assembly. Actually, the Political and Security Committee only

adjourned for three weeks when it resumed its mission on January 3. If the Chinese delegation

had the willingness to continue its participation in such meetings, Wu would just need to have

waited for less than two weeks if he had not had returned home on December 19. During that

time he would have had many opportunities to conduct diplomacy inside and outside of the

United Nations, with sponsorship of Soviet bloc and Arab-Asian group.

The timing of the departure was really problematic and detrimental to the image of the

PRC as supporter of peace rather than an aggressor. It led to further deterioration the relationship of the PRC with the Arab-Asian group, who were the strongest advocates for the establishment of the cease-fire committee. Wu’s departure simply shut the door of negotiation in the face of the international community, which posed a tremendous embarrassment and insult not only the members of the cease-fire group, but also to the neutral countries. In turn, Washington and its allies could take Wu’s departure as powerful evidence of Chinese Communist determination to continue its aggression in Korea. As we shall see, Wu’s defiance and the following events led to the passage of the aggressor resolution on February 1, 1951, which was a serious blow to the

PRC’s domestic environment and economic survival in the following two decades.

As a whole, the delegation’s performance was not satisfactory in its tasks of delivering speeches and conducting negotiations. Wu and the other delegates overused Communist ideological rhetoric in their speeches, which were addressed to diplomats in the meeting hall of

United Nations. Wu’s two long speeches were more like diatribes than sophisticated diplomatic arguments, which were supposed to be soft in tone and to avoid straightforwardness in disclosing their strategic goals and calculations.178 Wu’s advocacy of Third World revolution was a clear

178 On the other hand, Wu’s speech turned out to be a excellent piece of propaganda in Communist China’s war mobilization efforts. Serving domestic audience, this speech, together with Zhou’s statement to UN, were listed as

example of this immaturity. His discourse on the role of the PRC government in China’

intervention in the Korean War was not convincing or well-suited to the audience. Moreover, his characterization of China-US relations as a history of American aggression to China was really offensive to Washington decision makers who took that as a piece of evidence that the PRC was simply a proxy of Moscow. Had he not been so aggressive, the effect would have been much better. Regarding the second mission, the delegation’s performance was much poorer. Although it was true that they had limited or little authorization from Zhou in this regard, they should have done a much better job. They were badly unprepared for the diplomatic intercourse that took place intensively after they arrived in New York. They evaded most of these middlemen and failed to take these visits as chances to understand the circumstances of the UN and to lobby support for China’s position. They were uneasy and awkward in these occasions. To make things worse, they were not trying to adopt themselves to the new environment, but hurried to ask Zhou to allow them to leave US as early as possible; they made such proposal to Zhou as early as December 10.179 As for Zhou, although he did suggest the delegation, “if needed,”

could stay for a few days in New York, he also failed to realize the huge conveniences and

leverage that the existence of a PRC delegation in New York would bring about. With Zhou’s

approval and the departure of the delegation, PRC lost an otherwise valuable opportunity in its

years of diplomacy. The second PRC delegation to US would have to wait two decades later in

1971, when UN finally approved the People’s Republic’s admission to the UN.

the key readings in the “Movement to Resist America and Aid Korea”, a massive mobilization campaign targeted to reach basically the whole Chinese population. Wu also gained fame and political capital from this mission in his later career (he was selected into the CCP Central Committee in 1956.). See, Wei da de kang mei yuan chao yun dong (The Great Movement to Resist America and Aid Korea 伟大的抗美援朝运动) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1954), vol. 1, Pp. 47-65. 179 Zhou, “Telegram to Wu”, December 12, 1950, in Zhou, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou since the Founding of PRC ), Vol. 3, p.631

CHAPTER 3

THE CEASE-FIRE INITIATIVES AND THE AGGRESSOR RESOLUTION

The departure of Wu’s mission was did not mean the end of diplomatic efforts for a cease-fire and peace negations from parties involved. On the contrary, more intensive efforts were underway inside and outside UN as the war on the Korean peninsula continued.. This chapter will analyze these efforts, the parties involved and their calculations, the CCP’s attitudes and responses, the Communist military situation and foreign policy, and Stalin’s role. Special attention is paid to the CCP’s handling of the case-fire issue and the internal conflicts of military assessments among communist political and military leaders.

3.1 The UN Resolution of December 13: UN Cease-fire Group

Faced with Communist indifference and arrogance, the thirteen Arab-Asian countries never gave up their efforts. On December 13, the Political and Security Committee of the United

Nations General Assembly approved a resolution for the creation of a three-man cease-fire committee, including representatives from Iran, Canada, and India, to “determine the basis on which a satisfactory cease-fire in Korea can be arranged.”180 Passed by a vast majority of 51 to 5, this resolution reflected the broad anxiety of the international community on the explosive situation in Korea and their hope to stabilize the war with diplomatic means.

The passage of the resolution could be regarded as both pressure and an opportunity to the Communist side. How to deal with the group and its offers: cooperate with it or simply reject its legitimacy? This was not an easy decision to make. First of all, if we analyze the implications of this resolution in the debate and voting process as well as the immediate response after the

180 “3-man Group is Aim” , The New York Times, December 14, 1950, p. 1.

passage, some important features will emerge. First, the United States voted for the resolution, and was followed by nearly all her UN allies and friends. As we indicated earlier, the CCP had a deep distrust of US involvement any cease-fire offers which went back to its experiences in

China’s civil war. The active American involvement was really a negative weight to Beijing’s assessment of the situation. Second, the process of the passage was quite suspicious. There was not any debate whatsoever. The West and the neutral countries were so hurried or so determined to establish this group that all of them skipped this usually necessary step in which various opinions should have been voiced. The Soviet Union, however, was allowed to voice their opinion. As for the PRC, sources showed that Wu attended the meeting yet there was no evidence showing he made any speech. The reason for why he did not make any statement is yet to known. At any rate, he was not allowed to vote, a fact Beijing later used to reject the legitimacy of this resolution. Third, the second part of the resolution was dropped in the final voting. This part would have demanded: “the General Assembly recommends that the representatives of the following governments, namely (this section of the resolution was left bland with the participants to be named later), should as soon as possible meet and make recommendations for the peaceful settlement of existing issues.”181 CCP later accused the drop of this promise was a piece of evidence showing the insincerity and conspiracy of the cease-fire offer. Forth, and more importantly, according to Stueck, while negotiating with the Americans and the Arab-Asian colleagues, “Rau lost touch with the Chinese and the Soviets.”182 For whatever reason, this negligence on the part of the Indian ambassador could only have intensified the Communist impression that India was working for the interests of the West. All of

181 “UN board urged”, New York Times, Dec. 13, 1950. 182 Stueck, Korean War, p. 141.

these factors, in addition to the memory of the experience of the Chinese civil war, only led to the Communists to conclude that this was conspiracy orchestrated by the US.

With this being the assumption, Jacob Malik led the opposition to the proposal. In doing so he represented PRC’s attitude. He denounced the plan as a “hypocritical” attempt to save the

“Anglo-American troops” in Korea, because such a truce would merely give the United States forces time to regain their strength for further “aggression.”183 He warned that there would be no “peace” in the Far East until “all foreign troops (including UN forces) be withdrawn immediately from Korea” and all Chinese Communist demands were met.184

Regardless this opposition, the group started its work immediately. As expected, its contact with UNC was smooth and productive. On December 15, 1950, it secured a statement of the terms acceptable to the UNC. The terms were quite similar with those we see in later

Kaesong and Panmunjom truce talks, which mainly included:

1). All sides concerned should issue orders for the cessation of all acts of armed force in all areas of Korea.

2). A 20-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) shall be established with its south end along the 38th parallel.

3). All ground forces shall “remain in position or be withdrawn into the rear…. opposing air forces shall respect the demilitarized zone and the areas beyond the zone. Opposing naval force shall respect the waters … to the limit of,3 miles from shore.

4). Supervision of the cease-fire' shall be by a United Nations commission…All governments and authorities ' shall co-operate with the cease-fire commission and its ' designated observers in the performance of their duties.

5). All governments and authorities shall cease promptly the introduction into Korea, of any reinforcing or replacement units or personnel, including volunteers, and the introduction of additional war equipment and ' material…..

183 Anonymous, “Soviets Balk at a Truce”, The New York Times, Dec. 14, 1950. 184 Ibid..

6). Prisoners of war shall be exchanged on a one-for-one basis.185

How to evaluate these terms depends on what type of criteria to be used. If we look at

them from Zhou and Mao’s point of view, then this proposal is of little value, because it was

purely military, and failed to provide any promise or concession to CCP, such as withdrawal of

troops from Korea and Taiwan, and the resolution of the issue of the PRC’s seat in UN. But if we

exclude the political dimension and consider it from purely military perspective with a conscious

assessment of the real limits of the CPV, it would appear that this proposal was quite favorable to

communist forces. First of all, the plan automatically ceded a large area between Pyongyang to

the 38th parallel to Communists, who were only started to advance southwards from the

Pyongyang-Wonsan line. Secondly, the plan included cease-fire in the air and on the sea, both of which basically only applied to UN forces and were extremely favorable to Communist forces, because their air and sea forces were still in infancy, and their logistical lines were vulnerable to the UN forces’ massive bombing and blockades, which in turn seriously affected the and sustainability of the Chinese offensives. If we compare it with the final armistice agreement signed in July 1953, we cannot find fundamental differences between these two except some changes in the DMZ line and in the POW issue.

The more important implications of this plan lay in its political dimension. First, this plan provided a mechanism namely, a UN committee, to safeguard the enforcement of the cease-fire.

Together with this supposedly highly credible establishment was article 5 of forbidding any further military buildup in Korea. These two articles were strong reasons to refute Communist accusation that the cease-fire was a plot for UN forces to regroup and take a breath in order to initiate further attacks, because under the terms of the arrangement, that scenario would have

185 “Text of U.N. Cease-Fire Committee's Report of Unsuccessful Effort,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1951.

been nearly impossible. Closely related to this was the sincerity of Washington’s pursuit of a

long term cease-fire. Judging from these clauses, we may find the traces of President Truman’s

strategic thinking for the Korean war, namely, that this should be limited war, and that no

expansion of the war to mainland China would be allowed until all other means and tools had

been exhausted.

3.2 Zhou’s Reply

Zhou’s formal reply to the Cease-fire group’s initiative was carefully planned to come three days after the Wu mission’s departure on December 21, 1950. In this reply, Zhou elaborated the CCP’s “American cease-fire as a plot” theory, and raised the Communist “ pre-

conditioned cease-fire” or “negotiation first, truce second” concept to the international

community for the first time. In denouncing the “hypocrisy” of the UN’s non-conditional truce

plan, which Zhou claimed was the result of American manipulation, Zhou substantiated his

allegations by referring to the CCP’s experience of Marshall’s mediation mission during the

Chinese civil war in 1946:

Three-man Group----immediate cease-fire----peace negotiation---all-out offense. Chinese people was never unfamiliar with this Marshall formula, because in 1946, General Marshall helped Chiang Kai-shek play it for up to one year, and finally he left China after announcing his failure. The Chinese people learned a lesson in 1946, and gained their victory. Will they step into this trap again? No, they won’t. General Marshall’s trick would never be able to be played again in UN.186

Having made this point, Zhou then proclaimed the Chinese approach: any peace

mediation effort must be based on the promise that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Korea,

and Korean internal issues be solved by the Korean people themselves. In addition, Zhou stated

186 “Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai Statement about the UN General Assembly Resolution of December 14”, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents 中美关系史料), Vol. 2, p. 356.

that American troops must retreat from Taiwan, and that the question of the PRC’s UN seat must be resolved. He emphasized that until all these four conditions were fulfilled, no peace in Korea and Asia would be possible.187

In addition to these foreign policy proclamations, Zhou adopted concrete measures to which aimed to gain revenge for the hostility that Washington had shown toward the PRC since its founding. On December 28, 1950, he signed an executive order, which authorized that “all assets of the American government and American companies in the territories of the PRC should be under the control and liquidation of local authorities immediately,” and that “All public and private American bank savings in all banks (of PRC) should be frozen immediately.”188 The purpose of this measure and another order to nationalize US-subsidized schools, charity organizations, and churches, according to Zhou, was necessary in order to cleanse the remaining vestiges of American influence in China.189 These policies echoed the second doctrine in PRC foreign policy: to cleanse “imperialist influences” in China before establishing formal relations with those countries, as discussed in the Introduction. It may have been be logical for Zhou to articulate such policies, yet if the Beijing leadership really wanted to achieve peace or a ceasefire in Korea, the timing was questionable. A of these and other adventurist or opportunist policies of this period were largely based on Beijing’s highly inflated optimism that communist forces would be able to beat the UN forces down to the ground in Korea. In fact, the policies greatly intensified the hostilities between these two countries, and seriously damaged the already negative image of Communist China in the eyes of the American media and the general public.

187 Ibid., 358. 188 Zhou en lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976 1949-1976), December 28, 1950, p. 478. 189 Ibid, December 29, 1950, p. 478.

3.3 The Role of India as a Mediator of Cease-fire

India played a significant role in the first months of diplomacy of the Korean War. An understanding of the Indian role is essential if we are to get a complete picture of the PRC’s diplomacy and how it developed in the context of the emergence of the newly independent colonies, which were then rapidly ascending the international stage as a neutral force. First of all,

India worked as the messenger between China and the West starting from the outbreak of the war.

At that time, Beijing felt the need to send warnings to Washington not only through the release of press statements (which Zhou Enlai did on a regular basis), but also through formal diplomatic channels. Beijing, however, found that there was no direct channel of contact between the two capitals after US withdrew all of its diplomatic personal in April of that year. Zhou decided to send those messages via India, a country that he considered “friendly” to China in that it recognized the PRC shortly after its proclamation and that Nehru proclaimed his India to be a neutral, non-aligned country.

Nehru, however, had ambitions to be more than a messenger: he saw himself as a mediator in conflicts between the East and the West, a role that would help him to establish India as the leader of the third force in the global politics. This goal was not ungrounded or opportunist. Considering its population and natural resources, Indian deserved more prestigious international status than what it currently had. In addition, Nehru had a close relationship with the British leadership. In his book on Korean War, Stueck has clearly shown how British Prime

Minister Attlee and Nehru coordinated in the manner of close allies. For instance, “on his second day in Washington Attlee wired Nehru encouraging him to propose a cease-fire.”190 Furthermore,

Nehru also had influence on other commonwealth countries, such as Australia, New Zealand,

190 Stueck, Korean War, p. 140.

and Canada.

Beijing’s decision makers were skeptical of India’s purpose yet decided to take advantage

of its mediation. Zhou Enlai repeatedly questioned India’s neutrality regarding issues in Asia,

and he went so far to accuse that India of cooperating with Britain in an internal meeting, in

which he said, “ mainly on issue of China, Britain had followed Americans by supporting all

American-sponsored resolutions in UN, yet meanwhile asked India to oppose those

(resolutions). Now both Britain and India tended to stop this two-man drama (puppet show).”191

It was likely that China’s attitude toward Indian was affected by Soviet propaganda, which accused India of being reactionary, and under the wing of the “Anglo-American imperialists.”

But unlike the Soviets, the Chinese needed India to mediate between itself and the West, so it tended to lower its tone in attacking India. On July 21, 1950, in an address to a meeting of the

State Council, Zhou pointed out, “the reason that India did this (mediation) is it fears that a world war may be incited (from Korean War). Not only India, but also Indonesia and the Arab countries have the same worry, so we need to try our best to improve our relationship with India and other Asian Countries.”192 Even on the issue of Tibet, a region in which New Delhi claimed

to have special interests, Zhou tended to be as flexible as possible in order to maintain good

relations with India. On July 27, 1951, for instance, he promised that if India recognized that

Tibet was part of China, then “we will consider allowing Indians to trade with Tibetans and to set

up a consulate there.”193

191 Zhou, “the Reasons and Significances of CPV Military Victories”, in Jun shi wen xuan (Military Selected Works), vol. 1, p. 144. “主要是在中国问题上，过去对于美国在联合国的提案，英国总是赞成的，再告诉印度来反对，现在是不演这个双簧了. ” 192 Zhou en lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), July 21, 1950, p. 454. 193 Ibid., July 27, 1950, p. 455.

3.4 The Arab-Asian Group

The Arab-Asian Group consisted of quite a few, at one time as many as thirteen, Arab

and Asian countries who offered peace initiatives and provided mediation efforts in the United

Nations during the Korean War. Often referred as “neutral states,” their position was distinct

from that of the other non-Communist countries, led by US and U.K. Mainly coordinated by

India, this group played an active role in the mediation efforts in the UN throughout the course of

the War.194 Some common interests brought these countries together. First of all, they were

newly independent states from Western colonial rule, and they were more interested in how to

maintain their independence and develop their economies than in getting involved in a possible

new world war. Second, they were non-communist states, and ideologically not susceptible to

communism, yet they were not as fervent as Americans in their crusade against communism.

Instead, because they had experienced the suffering of Western colonial rule, they were quite

sympathetic toward Korea and China, as they had endured a similar historical experience. This

was especially true in the case of relations between Communist China and India, in which the

leaders of both countries repeatedly expressed their goodwill toward each other. Third, these

countries still had conflicts with the West in terms of territorial claims and economic issues. The

gap was especially serious in Arab countries, where US support for Israel, the ongoing failure of

the British to resolve the issues of military bases with Egypt or of oil revenues with Iran fueled

anti-Western nationalism.

The CCP’s attitude toward this group was similar with that which it adopted toward India, namely, to take advantage of their goodwill and to enhance bilateral political and economic ties in order to break the sanctions imposed by the West. Although there were unbridgeable political-

194 William Stueck, “Arab-Asian Peace Initiatives,” in Matray ed., Historical Dictionary of the Korean War, p. 20. Also, Stueck, Korean War, p. 196.

ideological gaps between Communist China and what Communists called the bourgeois

nationalist states around China, such as India, Indonesia, Burma, and Pakistan, the Chinese

communists carefully evaded or tried to trivialize theses differences. Instead, they promoted an

Asian version of the Monroe doctrine, promising China’s support of the decolonization struggles

of these countries and an active and pivotal role that China could and would play in the region.

For instance, on March 18, 1950, in a statement issued to repudiate Dean Acheson’s Asian policy

speech on March 15 at Commonwealth Club, California, Zhou proclaimed that the age is gone

when the US could forbid China from participating in Asian affairs, “Asian affairs should be

dealt by Asian people. At no time, should there be intervention by the American Imperialists

across the Pacific Ocean, such as Acheson and his ilk.”195 Such strategy would also be clearly

demonstrated in General Wu’s lengthy diatribe at UNSC in November 1950, in which he vowed

that his government would support the nationalist independent movements in Asia, Africa, and

Latin America from Western colonialism and imperialism, and he tactfully avoided any mention

of the fact that most of these countries had a deep trust, if not fear, of Communism.196

Nevertheless, Beijing never took the constant neutrality of these countries as an

unshakable factor in their foreign policy risk analysis and decision making. Instead, a deep

distrust and suspicion pervaded Zhou Enlai’s thinking on these matters, especially his weighing

of the degree of the sincerity and reliability of the UN cease-fire and peace negotiation initiatives

in which this group had played a major, if not dominant, role in the mediating and drafting

process. For instance, in a telegram to Wu about how to respond to the Arab-Asian group (what

195 Zhou en lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), March 18, 1950, p. 440. A full text of the statement could be found in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, Pp. 64-66. “亚洲人民自己的事情，应当由亚洲人民自己来处理，而无论在什么时候，也不应当由太平洋彼岸的美国帝国主义者，例如艾奇逊之流，来加以干涉！” 196 “Speeches by Warren Austin of U.S. and Wu Hsiu-chuan[Xiuquan] of Red China in Security Council”, New York Times, November 29, 1950.

the Chinese referred to as the Thirteen-State Group) cease-fire call in December 1950, Zhou

explained that he had serious doubts about the sincerity of their intentions. He wrote to Wu:

“Many countries of this group followed US in its invasion. In particular, the Philippines

dispatched troops to Korean to conduct an invasion. Now even the Philippines has called on

cease-fire. So the intention of this offer is very clear.”197 On the basis of such evidence as the

Philippines’ contradictory attitudes toward Korean War, Zhou concluded that this offer (the

resolution of 14 December) was a conspiracy orchestrated by the “desperate” Americans.

3.5 The CCP’s Assessment of Britain’s Attitude

In the CCP’s strategic calculations of the global politics on issues of Far East, the weight

of Britain was usually heavier than that of India or any other neutral country because it viewed

Britain as the second most powerful country of the Western camp and noted its continued

influence on the governments of its former colonies. Hence, in its Korean wartime diplomacy,

Beijing usually put considerable thought into the question of how to manipulate British attitudes

and British behavior. From the perspective of Mao and Zhou, London was still instrumental in

shaping Nehru’s foreign policy options, not only because of Nehru’s British education and

personal relations, but also because the Indian bourgeoisie and Indian capitalist economy was

still dependent on Britain. Moreover, even though it was in a steady decline, Britain still

maintained a large share of its traditional dominant influence on the other member states of

Commonwealth, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It was no exaggeration to call

Britain the “second largest imperialist state.”

London’s haste in taking the initiative to explore the possibilities of establishing trade

197 “Telegram to Wu Xiuquan etc. Concerning the Principles in Talking with Rau,” Dec. 13, 1951, in Zhou, Jian guo yi lai zhou en lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou since the Founding of PRC ), Vol. 3, p. 635.

and even diplomatic relations with the PRC had intensified Beijing’s impression that Britain

would be more vulnerable and easier to manipulate than the other “imperialist” countries, such as

the US and France. Earlier in March, 1948, the British government had contacted the

Communists to express its interest to trade with Communist “liberated regions.” In response,

Zhou had opened ports in Shandong and northern Jiangsu provinces, but not in Manchuria.198

Later, in a report on diplomatic issues, Zhou listed the attitudes of the three major imperialist

states toward the issue of recognition of the Beijing regime: “Britain tends toward recognizing us,

France adopts a dual policy, and US would not recognize us yet.”199 Hence, in the eyes of

Beijing leaders, Britain could be described, to borrow Lenin’s phrase, as “the weakest link of the

imperialist chain.”

More importantly, Communist leaders believed that they had strong enough leverage to

exert significant, sometimes dominant, impact on British Far East policy. According to Zhou,

Mao had even said that China caught hold of Britain’s two “pigtails” (a Chinese analogy for

“weakness” ). This was possible because Britain had accumulated massive economic and

political interests in China as the result of its century-old imperialist presence. Specifically,

Britain had over 200 million British pounds worth of investments throughout China, and it had

taken China’s Hong Kong as its colony. Both of which were among the top list of oversea

interests that London needed to protect.200 British investments included many factories and

companies that remained in China, under British ownership at the founding of the People’s

Republic. These were ideal targets for the Beijing regime, which could use sanctions or threats

of sanctions, in order to coerce Britain to support or keep silent to China’s foreign policy, or in

198 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), March 31, 1948, p. 389. 199 Ibid., December 16, 1949, p. 435. 200 Zhou, “the Reasons and Significances of CPV Military Victories”, in Jun shi wen xuan (Military Selected Works), vol. 1, p. 144.

some cases to take revenge for British diplomatic behavior. For instance, on April 17, 1951,

Zhou issued orders for the expropriation of the Asiatic Petroleum Company, a British company

that had 15 port branches and more than 60 sales offices across China. This step was taken in

revenge for the actions of the British authorities in Hong Kong, who had expropriated for

military reason one of China’s largest oil tankers which was docked in Hong Kong for

maintenance.201 Britain’s continued presence in its colony of Hong Kong gave China even more

power: Mao used that power throughout the nearly thirty years of his rule, putting pressure on

Hong Kong in order to force the British to modify their foreign policy. For example, by

threatening to take over Hong Kong by military force Beijing compelled London to allow the

People’s Republic to conduct trade (both legitimate trade and smuggling) with the capitalist

world through the port of Hong Kong in a period when China faced UN sanctions (sanctions that

lasted into the 1970s) as a result of being labeled as the aggressor in the Korean War. Bejing’s

leaders believed that the British regarded Hong Kong as the pearl of the remains of their empire,

and that London would thus find it too costly to abandon the territory.

This made Beijing’s decision makers confident that London would likely distance itself

from the Americans on the Korean War and other issues in the Far East. As Zhou saw it, London

would continue its current double dealer attitude on Korea: while Attlee openly supported

American efforts in Korea and sent British troops there, in secret, he was the backbone or

behind-the-scenes puppet-master of New Delhi’s mediation efforts. This, Zhou believed, showed

that London, unlike Washington, dared not risk a direct military conflict with.202 Zhou predicted

that London’s dual policy in Korea would gradually lead to open conflict with Washington. Zhou

201 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), April 17, 1951, p. 496. 202 Zhou, “the Reasons and Significances of CPV Military Victories”, in Jun shi wen xuan (Military Selected Works), vol. 1, p. 144.

further substantiated his point by indicated that British were anxious that if Washington

continued to pour its limited resources into Korea and mainland China, then the security of

Europe would at serious risk from Soviet threats.203 This optimism went so far that in an

address in late January 1951, when debates were under way in the UN, Zhou predicted that

“Britain would not support American resolution on condemning China.”204 Zhou calculated that

if Britain voted against or abstained from the resolution, together with solid opposition of India,

and perhaps France, then it would be very difficult to gain passage. 205

3.6 Assessments from the Battlefield Commander: Marshal Peng Dehuai’s Perspective

From December 1950 to June, 1951, Marshal Peng Dehuai, the top commander of

Communist China’s troops in Korea (CPV), found himself in constant discords with Mao and

Stalin on the broad issue of the war situation in Korea. Areas of difference included assessment

and analysis of the battlefield situation, of Communist forces, questions of logistics, the

sustainability of the Communist offensives, and the purpose and goals of the UN forces

operations. The conflicts between them became a constant source of tensionin the Communist

leadership.

The first instance of discord was on the issue of crossing the 38th parallel. There were

disagreements both about the feasibility and timing of the operation. On December 8, in a

telegram to Mao on the objectives of the coming Third Campaign, Peng provided a sober, if not

pessimistic, view of the war situation.206 He suggested that if the CPV could not annihilate the

203 Ibid.. 204 Ibid.. 205 Ibid.. 206 “Peng Telegram to Mao Concerning the Objectives of the Next Campaign,” December 8, 1951, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life) , pp 453-454.

targeted 4 UN divisions (the South Korean 1st and 6th divisions, and the American 1st Cavalry ,

and 24th divisions), a goal that he thought would be very difficult for his troops to achieve, then

even if Communist troops were able to cross the Parallel and advanced further southwards, the

new front line would stretch the supply lines to the point at which they would become unreliable

and vulnerable to the brutal air strikes of the UN forces. This in turn would multiply Communist

difficulties in future offensives. Due to this consideration, as well as the extreme logistical

difficulties (according to him, many of his soldiers had little food, no winter clothes, no shelter,

and even no shoes to wear in the bitter Korean winter), fatigue, and cold weather, Peng planned

to “halt the offensive ten to twenty miles to the north of the 38th parallel, and let the enemy to

occupy the parallel, in order to initiate a decisive attack in the spring to destroy the major portion

of the enemy forces.”207 Mao rebuffed his proposal, replying 5 days later on December 13, 1951,

a relatively slow speed of response compared with Mao’s normal swift manner in dealing with

this kind of urgent matter.208Mao pointed out the coincidence of Peng’s plan to the “cease-fire scheme” then being put forth by the Anglo-American bloc, a scheme which demanded that the

Communists halt their advance the north of the Parallel, which, Mao believed, was a plot to allow the enemy to regroup and prepare for further attacks. In order to foil this scheme, Mao told Peng: “the CPV must cross the 38th parallel. If we stop our advance north of the Parallel, it may put us in an extremely disadvantageous political position.”209 Throughout the telegram,

Mao did not address the difficulties that Peng had raised, although he underscored the need of

sending reinforcements to the front, and the need to Communist air cover to protect the railroads

(he said such cover operations were “in preparation,” and confessed there might have “chances”

207 Ibid., p. 454. 208 “Mao Telegram to Peng”, December 13, 1951, in Mao, Jun shi wen xuan nei bu ben (Military Selected Works Internal Edition), pp. 681-682. 209 Ibid., 681.

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of success), let alone to pay as serious attention to them as Peng did.210 This suggests that an

overconfidence born of Mao’s decades of civil war experience significantly clouded his

judgment when dealing with the War in Korea.

Although Peng had to follow Mao’s directive, he never gave up criticizing the military adventurism that also seemed to have permeated the thinking of t his communist comrades, including those from North Korea and the Soviet Union. On December 19, in a telegram to Mao, he frankly disclosed his own assessment of the battlefield situation: “After the great victories of the first two offensives, a sentiment for quick victory and a blind optimism are on the rise dramatically among all sides. The Soviet ambassador says that American forces will flee rapidly, and some Koreans hold the same view. In my opinion, however, the Korean War will still be a long-term and difficult process. The enemy has switched from offense to defense in a well-

planned manner. His lines have now become shortened, his troops more concentrated, his front

narrowed, and his depth increased. All of these changes are to the advantage of the [American

style of] combined arms warfare” (tank, artillery, air, and infantry) .211 Although Peng did not (or

maybe dared not) point out clearly that Mao held the same opportunist view with regard to the

war, he implied it between the lines of his telegram. This impression will be clearer if we take a

look at his earlier correspondence with Mao.

Regarding CPV’s logistics and the air cover problems, as the field commander, Peng had

direct experience and a much more somber perception of the degree of difficulty those problems

imposed on the continuation of the CPV’s offensives than his Beijing superiors, who often held

the view that those issues were indeed very serious, yet for their part they had done the best to

210 Ibid, 682. 211 “Peng Telegram to Mao and Gao (Gang) Concerning Questions of Song Army Corpse and Crossing 38th Parallel,” December 19, 1950, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life), p.456.

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solve them, and that the CPV troops were capable of continuing their offensives even though

those problems remained. This gap in their perception and understanding was so wide that in

February 1951, Peng decided to leave his command temporarily and return to Beijing to

communicate with Beijing’s leaders and persuade them to expand their efforts in terms of

logistical support. At noon on February 21, 1951, at the Mao’s in the suburbs of Beijing, he was

in such a hurriy to see Mao that he brushed aside the warning of Mao’s guards opened the door

of Mao’s bedroom, woke up Mao, and reported to him the dangerous conditions of the front, and

many serious problems that the troops were facing. Mao, obviously unhappy with this encounter, nonetheless had to express some degree of agreement with Peng, acknowledging that “We should not expect a quick victory.”212 Mao’s compromise came very reluctantly because the

new attitude was tantamount to a negation of his original plan for Korea, and we can see later

how the frustrated Mao poured nearly all of his military power into Korea in a last bid for a

quick and decisive victory. Peng continued his attack on Beijing’s leaders for their slack support

of the military efforts. On February 25, at a joint meeting of the military and civil departments of

the PRC central government hosted by Zhou, Peng criticized the domestic support of the war

effort of extreme inefficiencies which, he alleged, had contributed to tremendous and otherwise

avoidable causalities. The meeting turned into a drama in which Peng “lost his temper wildly,

and the meeting ended in mood of anger among participants.”213

Most extraordinary, sharply different from Zhou and Mao, Peng showed great interest in

the possible cease-fire arrangement that was under way in the UN mediation efforts. On January

15, 1951, in a telegram to Zhou, he expressed his wholehearted support for a cease-fire, saying

that “if the cease-fire could be extended to the end of March, it would not obstruct our fighting;

212 Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life), February 21, 1951, p.480. 213 Ibid., February 25, 1951, p. 480.

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instead, it would be favorable to us because it can help decrease the activities of the enemy

warplanes, and help facilitate our preparations.”214 Here, we can see that the air superiority of the

UN forces had created an unbearable pressure to the operations and logistics of Communist

forces. The field commanders, such as Peng, were in a position (in the battlefield) that made it

easier for them to gain a more concrete and direct understanding of impact of these airstrikes

than those who were seated far away in the rear in the airstrike-free Beijing, such as Mao or

Zhou, who learned of the airstrikes from reports rather than the real experience. Here too, we see

some similarity with the Chinese leaders’ civil war experiences. Throughout China’s 22 years of

civil war (interrupted by Japanese invasion), air strikes and Chiang Kai-shek’s air superiority had, on the whole, never been a major issue to Communists, since Chiang’s feeble air force was never be able to pose a significant threat to the Red Army or later People’s Liberation Army. In

Korean War, although Mao admitted the importance of air cover to Communist ground operations and transportation, he failed to pay fair and enough attention or value to air power in his overall strategic thinking and decision making., at least during months from China’s entering into the War to the start of armistice talks at Kaesong, a period that this thesis covers.215

The most dramatic of Peng’s proposals regarding the idea of a cease-fire came on

January 27, 1951. Under the immense pressure of the all-out UN offensive, Peng decided to

214 Ibid., January 15, 1951, p. 467. 215 Zhang Xiaoming has thoroughly studied the Communist Air War in Korea mainly relied on Chinese sources, and published a book on it with the title of Red Wings over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union, and the Air War in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). According to the author, Communist China’s own air force entered into the War in a time as late as the summer of 1952, when the large-scale ground fighting had been halted nearly two years ago.(Chapter 7) From November 1950 to mid 1952, only Soviet air force had limited participation into the War. Even so, the author finds that “Soviet contributed little to the Communist victory in the early 1951”, and the author suggests that the lack of air cover could be one of the factors that led to Peng Dehuai’s proposal to halt Communist offensive in early January 1951. (124) In months of Spring and early summer in 1951, when the ground warfare entered into the most brutal and decisive stage, Soviets did increased their air involvement by sending two air divisions to station at Chinese border along the Yalu River, yet their “primary responsibility” was to protect the airfields and bridges along the River, rather than to provide any air cover to the ground troops or to conduct air strikes to the UN adversaries. (127)

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make a bold suggestion to his superiors in Beijing. After consultation with Korean leader Kim Il- sung and other Chinese military commanders, Peng sent a telegram to Mao and proposed an immediate cease-fire:

In order to deepen the internal frictions within the imperialist camp, is that possible to make an announcement that the Chinese and Korean armies will support a limited term cease-fire, and hence will withdraw northwards from 15 to 30 kilometers from the Wushan-Taipingli-Danqiuli line? If you approve, please broadcast it from Beijing…..Does the political situation allow us to withdraw temporarily from Inchon and its forts? If we cannot stop the advance of the enemy, and if the political situation does not allow us to withdraw from Seoul and Inchon, then we have to initiate a counteroffensive, but it would be quite difficult for us to do so.216

This time, Mao’s reply came swiftly on the next day. He rejected Peng’s proposal. He

also provided a brief explanation for his decision:

First, we must immediately start the preparation for the Fourth Campaign…. Third, during the preparation, we must maintain our control of Inchon and Seoul. …..Fourth, your proposal is inappropriate that Chinese and Korean forces withdraw 15 to 30 kilometers and broad a announcement that we support a limited term cease-fire, because the enemy just wants us to withdraw some kilometers, so that they can blockade the Han River, and then start a cease-fire. Fifth, after the end of Fourth Campaign, it is possible that the enemy would agree to start the political negotiation with us about the settlement of Korean issues, the timing of which would be favorable to China and Korea. Sixth, it is true that there are serious difficulties on our side in the terms of new soldiers and ammunition, but…..we still have the capability to annihilate a few sections of American forces and four to five South Korean divisions.217

It is evident that Mao was still determined to continue his adventurist military plan to

drive the UN forces out of the peninsular and rejected any cease-fire until his military objectives

were achieved. This impractical and unrealistic thinking led to disagreements, sometimes quite

serious, between Mao and Peng. In hindsight, Peng was surely right in his assessment of the

216 Ibid., January 27, 1951, p. 469. “为增加帝国主义内部矛盾，可否播发中朝两军拥护限期停战，人民军与志愿军从乌山、太平里、丹邱里线，向北撤十五至三十公里的消息？如同意，请由北京播出…..如我暂时放弃仁川及桥头阵地，国内外政治情况是否许可? 如不能停止敌北进，政治上又不许可放弃汉城、仁川，即须被迫部署反击，但从各方面考虑甚为勉强。”

217 Ibid., January 28, 1951, pp 469-470.

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military situation and in , shis cease-fire proposal, yet on both counts he was rebuffed by an

overconfident Mao, whose decisions were then responsible for the setbacks and withdrawal of

Communist forces beginning in February, not only from Seoul and Inchon, but also further

northwards from 38th parallel, with astonishing casualties.

Inside Communist Chinese Party, Peng was famous for his uprightness, honesty, and

simple life (characteristics which Mao and Lin Biao would later interpret as evidence that Peng

was a “hypocrite” with political ambition218). These moral characteristic often led to discord or

even open defiance of his superiors, mostly Mao, if Peng found himself was on the right side of

the issue, as we see in critical moments of Korean War. He was dismissed from the position of

Minister of Defense in 1959 for his open criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Movement, as

well as what his assessment of his thirty years of working relationship with Mao as “70% of lack

of cooperation, 30% of cooperation.”219 In the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, he suffered

horrible humiliation during numerous “struggle sessions” conducted by Red Guards, some of

which involved physical abuse. On July 19, 1967, two of his ribs (right fifth and right tenth) were

beaten broken and his left lung was seriously damaged (both caused internal bleeding) in a brutal

struggle session at Beijing Aviation College.220 He died of rectum cancer in November 1974,

when he was still imprisoned.

218 Li Rui, Lu shan hui yi shi lu (On-site Records of Lushan Meeting 庐山会议实录) (Zhenzhou: He nan ren min chu ban she, 1994), p. 139. In a politburo meeting of CCP in the summer of 1959 at a mountain resort at Lu Shan, Peng was accused as the head of an anti-Party clique, the goal of which was to overthrow Mao’s leadership. At one session, according to the author, who was then the writer of the minutes, Lin Biao attacked Peng as “a careerist, conspirator, hypocrite, another Feng Yuxiang [a warlord infamous for his volatile political attitudes]”. Lin emphasized, “in China, only Chairman Mao is the big hero. Anybody else should give up the hope to become the big hero”. According to the author, Lin said these words in a harsh tone and with a severe look. 219 Ibid., July 31, 1959, p. 746. 220 Ibid., July 19-July 23, 1967 , pp. 806-807.

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3.7 The Five-Principle Plan

Zhou’s reply to UN Cease-fire group’s offer on December 21, 1950 was totally

incompatible with the UN’s concept of what a cease-fire would be. The group, on the other hand,

seemed also well aware of Beijing’s suspicion that such offer could be an American plot, and

General Wu’s press statement must have corroborated their impression. Therefore, during their

wait for Zhou’s reply, on December 19, 1950, the same date that General Wu left New York, the

group cabled Beijing again to clarify their position on the relation of the cease-fire and peace negotiation in order to provide some assurances to Beijing:

Once a cease-fire agreement reached, the proposed peace negotiation should be initiated immediately…..The Negotiation Committee should include the government of PRC…in order to find effective means for peaceful solution of the current Far East problems among US, Britain, Soviet Union, and China. We believe, this Committee must be formed as soon as possible. Yet in order to realize this plan, the “cease-fire” agreement must be enforced first.221

The gap between the Group and Beijing was so vast as to be bridgeable unless one side or

another made a fundamental adjustment to their position. After a few failed attempts to reach

Beijing for clarification of Zhou’s December 21 reply, the frustrated Cease-fire Group reported its unsuccessful effort to the UN Political Committee, admitting on January 2, 1951 that it had been “unable to pursue discussion of a satisfactory cease-fire arrangement.”222

The Political Committee then asked the group to prepare a '”statement of principles” on

further steps that might be taken. On January 11, the UN Cease-fire Group produced a

"Supplementary Report," which enumerated the five principles on which Korean and Far East

settlements might be based:

1). Arrangement of a cease-fire containing safeguards to make sure it was not used as a

221 “Korean Cease-fire Group Report to the Fifth UN General Assembly”, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, p.365. 222 Ibid., 366.

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screen to cover preparations for new offensives.

2). If and when a cease-fire occurs, through formal arrangement or a lull in the fighting preparatory to an agreement, consideration should be given to further steps toward restoring peace.

3). To permit the creation of a unified, independent and democratic Korea. All non- Korean armed forces should be withdrawn at appropriate stages.

4). An interim administration should be set up.

5). As soon as agreement on a cease-fire is reached, the Assembly should set up a committee in representatives of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to try to achieve settlement of Far Eastern problems, specifically, Formosa (Taiwan) and admission of Beijing to the United Nations.223

This program was mainly drafted by the Indian member of the group, Sir Benegal Rau,

who was backed by the Arab-Asian group. According to Stueck, these principles were also on

the top agenda of the conference of prime ministers of the British Commonwealth, held in early

January in London, in which Nehru played an active role. The purpose of this program was to

link the cease-fire and the following political negotiations and settlements in a convincing and

solid way. First, it confirmed the cease-fire would be monitored, and would not be used as breathing-space for the preparation of any further attack, which had been Communist China’s main concern. Second, it provided a solid mechanism for the political settlement of the Korea,

Taiwan, and China seat problems, in which the PRC’s interests would be protected and its demands be met to a greatest extent possible in the context of the Cold War in 1951. These mediators tried to show Beijing that the cease-fire was not a plot or a scheme, but a solid

beginning to the political settlement about Chinese security and its rights in the international

community.

Fearing that the current Korean conflict might develop into a new world war, many

members of the UN were ready to compromise with the Chinese communists on the issue of

223 “5-Point Truce Aim,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1951

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Taiwan. India again took the lead. The Indian ambassador Sir Rau, indicated that his country

“stood for putting the island under Communist China.” Even Sir Gladwyn Jebb of Britain held a

similar view declaring that the truce plan was only way that “the Peiping [Beijing] government

could achieve its ambitions in Formosa [Taiwan]short of conquering the United Nations in a

general war.” 224

The most striking and abnormal aspect in whole process was the attitude of the US,

whose UN representative, Warren Austin, openly announced that his government would support

this resolution. In his speech in the meeting of the Political and Security Committee on January

11, Austin started routinely with condemning the defiance and aggression of Chinese

communists in Korea, and stressed the need for “free world” to demonstrate “its united will to

withstand aggression.”225 However, he then admitted that there were “a substantial number of the

members of the UN supporting this recommendation of the group of three.”226Even more surprisingly, he promised that “to maintain the unity of the free world, I shall vote in favor of the proposal.”227 In order words, he attributed his otherwise impossible support to the pressure of

American allies and friends.

In his memoir, Acheson described the dilemma that the Americans faced in this critical

moment in the history of US foreign policy: “the choice whether to support or oppose this plan

was a murderous threatening one. On one side, the loss of the Koreans and the fury of Congress

and press and, on the other, the loss of our majority and support in the United Nations.”228 So

even Acheson admitted the importance of improving America’s somewhat belligerent image in

224 Ibid.. 225 “UN Cease-fire Project and Statements by Austin, Jebb and Malik “New York Times, Jan 12, 1951. 226 Ibid.. 227 Ibid.. 228 Acheson, Present at the creation, p. 513.

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the UN by showing respect for the “collective will” of the members. Yet meanwhile, if

Washington supported for this plan, and if Beijing agreed with it, then Washington’s vote would be interpreted as a surrender to Communism, a unbearable blow to the already fragile Truman administration.

The question then arises: what was the real motivation and calculation of US move in voting in the affirmative on this issue? Principle 5 of this plan was in fundamental conflict with

President Truman’s foreign policy. The idea of convening a 4-power parley including the PRC was unconceivable in the logic of American strategic thinking and foreign policy goals of the time. In addition, the US remained strongly opposed the PRC’s admission to the UN until such time as the Chinese Communists changed their hostile attitude toward the West, and put an end to policies which, in Washington’s view, amounted to the persecution of the Chinese people.

Regarding Taiwan, the US insisted that its military involvement in Taiwan Strait was a

“neutralization” effort, so there was no such issue as an “American invasion of Taiwan.” But now, by voting in favor of this cease-fire and peace plan, Washington seemed to be willing to call into question some of the most vigorously upheld tenets of its foreign policy. It was no wonder that Washington’s move immediately elicited poignant criticisms from its domestic opponents. For instance, Senator Robert Taft, the Republican policy leader in congress, called

US acceptance “a shocking step” toward appeasement, and he warned the Administration against “making any deal with the Chinese reds.”229

From the memoirs and government archives, we find it clear that this new stance was a plot, orchestrated by Dean Acheson, with the purpose of accumulating more support for the passage of the coming American resolution of branding the PRC as the aggressor. The plot

229 “Taft Sees a Step to Appeasement,” New York Times, Jan 14, 1951

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assumed that Beijing would very likely to reject this offer again, just as it had rejected the

legitimacy of the cease-fire group in the previous month. This assumption was supported by the

Soviet representative Malik’s speech, who once again expressed his opposition to this type of

resolution. By voting in favor of this 5-principle plan, Washington would likely improve its

image as a peace-maker rather a reckless warmonger, because its uncompromising stance in Far

East issues in recent months had taken a toll on its international moral legitimacy as a leader for

peace. If Beijing rejected the offer as expected, then the US would be able to utilize this refusal

and its newly gained moral capital to push the UN members to join the US in passing the

resolution labeling PRC as the aggressor in Korea.

Again in his memoir, Dean Acheson disclosed his plan plainly: “we chose, after painful

deliberation in the Department -- and after I recommended to the President what may well have

been, even without hindsight, the wrong alternative -- to support the resolution. We did so in the

fervent hope and belief that the Chinese would reject it (as they did) and that our allies would

then return (as they did) to comparative sanity and follow us in censuring the Chinese as

aggressors.”230

The resolution was easily passed with 50 (for) to 7 (against) voting result on January 13,

1951, in the Political and Security Committee.231 Under the lead of United States, most of the

Western bloc countries approved this Resolution, which clearly offered extremely advantageous

terms to Communist China. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China (or Free China in the regime’s propaganda) was understandably adamantly opposed to this plan. T.F.Tsiang, its Representative to UN, denounced the plan as another “Munich Scheme” to “sell out” Free China in Taiwan.232

230 Acheson, Present at the creation, p. 513. 231 “Asia Peace Plan Voted In UN, “New York Times, Jan 14, 1951. 232 Ibid..

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What really concerned him was Principle 5 of the Resolution, which made a promise to seriously consider the status of Taiwan and the PRC’s admission to the UN, a provision that nearly equaled a death sentence for Nationalist China. Tsiang successfully persuaded only El

Salvador, a small country in Latin America, to follow its position.

The more meaningful opposition, however, came from the 5 votes of the Soviet bloc.

This opposition foretold to some extent the inauspicious destiny of this plan. According to Jacob

Malik, Soviet Permanent Representative to UN, under the plan, the cease-fire was put “at the top of the list while the passing of the following steps is relegated to an indefinite and vague future.” 233 In other words, although the West was desperate for a truce, it was not willing to make any concrete concessions to meet the demands of Communists in Beijing. He also criticized the “foggy and vague character of the wording” of the text and suspected that such text was deliberately invented for later convenient interpretations and adaptations by those behind the scenes. He concluded that this project contained nothing new; therefore his government could not extend its support to this proposal.234 In hindsight, Malik’s judgment was wrong; he underestimated the possible advantages and costs that this project would bring to

China’s Communists. From his statement, we could detect a deep rooted Soviet suspicion and distrust of the West and any of its peace initiatives. Unfortunately for the Communists, this time they were falling to a trap that was set by Americans who planned to take advantage of their suspicion and distrust of the West and turn it to their own benefit.

From the perspective of the Chinese Communists, their refusal of this resolution was the result of two layers of factors: internal and external. The internal factors included their continued confidence in military victory, their tradition of military struggle as the primary means of

233 “UN Cease-fire Project and Statements by Austin, Jebb and Malik “New York Times, Jan 12, 1951. 234 Ibid..

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achieving political goals, their deep-rooted distrust and suspicion of Americans and their China

policy; and their distrust of the concept of three man cease-fire groups and the cease-fire plan,

based on their civil war experience. External factors included: Moscow’s dominant influence;

and their belief that the British and the Arab-Asian neutral countries could be used as leverage

to balance American belligerency. All of these factors worked together, contributing to the CCP

leadership’s decision. At the same time, the Communists failed to pay enough attention to the

potential risks and costs if they rejected this resolution.

In a memorandum to North Korean government, Zhou echoed Malik’s suspicion of the

truce as a conspiracy.235 He warned Kim Il-sung that “if we agree to enforce a cease-fire first, then US would likely be able to maintain its military power and made Syngman Rhee [President of South Korea] able to control some regions and troops, so that they can delay and postpone negotiations indefinitely.”236 His line of reasoning started with a “fact” he perceived, namely

that“the Americans hurried to find a way out because of its defeats in Korea .” As we see, that

“fact” was actually an unsubstantiated assumption that was far from the realities in the battlefield

as reported by China’s field commander Marshal Peng Dehuai. Zhou continued to say that

Washington had two options: “an honorable truce” and “a limited war,” and that Washington

preferred the former. Zhou argued that “a disgraceful truce for the Americans” was in the

interests of the Communists and should be the goal of Communist diplomacy. In the dictionary

of Zhou, if we refer to his behavior in China’s civil war, a “disgraceful truce” for the enemy was

a synonym of a truce with political conditions. In conclusion, he proposed that the Communist

bloc must reject this plan. Instead, he drafted four counter-proposals to the original UN plan,

which willbe addressed in the following section. At the end of the memo, he notified Kim that

235 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), January 14, 1951, p. 481. 236 Ibid..

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his proposed response to this plan “had attained the approval of Soviet government, who

promised to provide assistance.”237

This memo had been mentioned in various telegrams of declassified Soviet and Chinese

archives, especially in two publications of former Soviet archives edited by Weathersby and

Shen respectively.238 The frequency of the appearance of this memo among top Communist

leaders’ desks reflected the importance and complicated nature of the cease-fire issue. For

instance, in a telegram to Stalin, Mao suggested he had asked Kim Il-sung to visit Beijing immediately to discuss how to respond to the UN peace offer.239 Yet in another telegram, Mao

changed his mind, suggested that Kim to stay in Korea, and asked Zhou to draft a memo

instead.240 Stalin’s attitude on this issue is of particular interest. On January 13, 1951, Rotschin

dispatched a telegram saying that “Vyshinsky proposed to visit Zhou Enlai and transmit to him

Filippov (Stalin)’s telegram regarding the memorandum of Chinese government.”241 Neither

Weathersby’s article nor Shen’s book, includes Stalin’s telegram, although in both sources we

see evidence that Zhou implied that Stalin had provided significant suggestions and consultations

to his drafted proposal in December 1950, in which Stalin tutored his young Chinese comrades in

how to deal with non-communist diplomats in a more sophisticated manner. The only available

source is Zhou’s mention that the Soviet government had approved his proposal in his memo,

237 Ibid.. 238 “13 January 1951,ciphered telegram, Roshchin to USSR Foreign Ministry”, in Kathryn Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War”, in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Winter 1995, pp.54-55. A slightly different version of this telegram could also be found in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 655. Also, Mao, “a Revision of the Memo to Kim Il-sung”, in Mao, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Zhou Since the Founding of PRC), vol. 2, p. 28. 239 “13 January 1951,ciphered telegram, Roshchin to USSR Foreign Ministry”, in Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War”, p. 54. 240 Mao, “a Revision of the Memo to Kim Il-sung”, in Mao, Jian guo yi lai wen gao (Manuscripts of Mao since the Founding of PRC), vol. 2, p. 28. 241 “13 January 1951,ciphered telegram, Roshchin to USSR Foreign Ministry”, in Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War”, p. 55.

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which itself is sufficient to imply that Stalin had agreed with Zhou’s proposal.

Zhou’s formal reply was sent on January 17. In this carefully worded statement, Zhou did

not reject the new UN peace offer outright, and he also stopped employing the defiant and

arrogant tone as he had earlier. Instead, he tried to soften his tone to convey his message. Zhou

began with the reiteration of China’s three political conditions on the cease-fire, but then interestingly, he did not attack the resolution with any negative phrases such as “illegal, void, and lull,” the kind of language that he had adopted in his earlier statement in December 22, even though he raised the fact the PRC did not participate in the passage of this resolution. Actually, throughout the text, Zhou avoided any direct attack on the UN plan. Moreover, he explained patiently why his government could not accept this plan, giving two reasons. First, “the purpose of the arrangement of a cease-fire as the first step to peace is merely to give the United States troops a breathing space,” and second, the PRC worried that “negotiations after the cease-fire comes into effect may only entail endless discussions but cannot solve any problems.”242

More strikingly, Zhou then provided a 4-point counterproposal to the UN roadmap. The gist of his plan was to convene a 7-natiion conference outside the UN framework to conduct negations on the issues concerned:

A. Negotiations should be held….in order to put an end to the hostilities in Korea at an early date;

B. The subject matter of the negotiations must include the withdrawal of United States armed forces from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait, and related Far Eastern problems;

C. The countries to participate in the negotiations should be the following seven countries: the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, France, India and Egypt, and the rightful place of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations should be established as from the beginning of the seven-nation conference;

242 Zhou, “Reply to Chairman of the 5th UN General Assembly Political and Security Committee, and Proposal to Convene a 7-nation Conference on Important Questions on Korea and Asia”, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China- US Relations Documents), Vol. 2, pp. 373-374.

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D. The 7-nation conference should be held in China, at a place to be selected.243

After an analysis of this reply, we can see that although Zhou stopped denouncing the UN

resolution as illegal and tried to show that he was ready to bargain over the terms in the UN plan,

it would be impossible for the US and its allies to accept his four-point counter proposal. Even

many neutral countries would not be able to accept it because Zhou’s plan was still a pre-

condition of any truce arrangement. As discussed earlier, the Chinese Communist “negotiation

first then cease-fire” mentality was based on the belief that their military power and performance

had begun to overwhelm their adversaries, who had fallen into a miserable condition and had

little leverage available. Hence, they would either have to accept Communist terms or wait to be

crushed. This was the scenario that Chiang Kai-shek faced in early 1949. Yet the situation in

Korea in 1951 was much more complicated and different than that in China in 1946 or 1949. In

contrast to Nationalists in the Chinese Civil war, the Americans in Korean War was much less

desperate than Nationalists, and it would have been much more difficult to be crush them,

because their military power, industrial-economic strength, and diplomatic influence were much

stronger that KMT. In the early stage of Korean War, however, the Communist leaders assumed

these two cases were comparable or similar, and that the civil war model could be applied into

the Korean War. Under this thinking, CCP’s foreign policy had to fall into the swamp of

adventurism. If Chinese troops were lucky enough to annihilate a large share of American troops

in Korea, such as 4 or 5 divisions as demanded by Mao, then Zhou’s diplomatic blackmailing

might be successful, otherwise, if the CPV’s offensives were stalled or pulled back, and failed to

achieve their goals of annihilating American units, then this foreign policy would run the risk of

incurring catastrophic consequences for the People’s Republic of.

243 Ibid.. An English translation of this text could be found with the name of “Red China's Reply to UN on Truce Plan”, New York Times, Jan 18, 1951.

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3.8 The Aggressor Resolution244

As discussed earlier, the Americans never took its surprising support for the five-

principle plan as a sincere stand reflecting any new changes of US foreign policy: on the contrary,

top decision makers in Washington took it simply as a temporary tactic for the purpose of

attracting broader support for its forthcoming diplomatic offensive. This action was really a

highly risky gamble, because if Beijing had accepted the plan (although very unlikely), then

President Truman’s administration would definitely have come under unbearable attacks both

from the Senate and the public. Therefore, when Zhou’s reply reached Lake Success, the State

Department really took it a great relief. Following their s plan, the Americans immediately

attacked Zhou’s reply as a flat refusal and the latest evidence of China’s aggressiveness and arrogance. They spared no time in calling for an immediate condemnation of Chinese aggression, branding Communist China an aggressor and requesting action by the United Nations Collective

Measures Committee.

In his speech before the General Assembly's Political Committee on January 20, Warren

Austin attacked Zhou’s three replies to UN’s offers since last December, “three times our

sincere efforts for peace have been scorned as weakness and treated with derision.”245 He tried

his best to agitate a sentiment against China among the members. For instance, he accused the

swift end of Wu Xiuquan’s mission as evidence of the CCP’s determination to continue the war,

arguing that “Mr. Zhou refused to allow General Wu to remain longer at Lake Success.” 246 After

244 Passed by UN General Assembly on February 1, 1951, The full title of this resolution is “Intervention of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China in Korea”. It finds that PRC is committing aggression in Korea. For narrative convenience, in this thesis, this document is called the Aggressor Resolution or Aggression Resolution. A digitalized version of the original print text can be found at UN official website: http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/r5.htm 245 “Text of Austin Speech Asking UN Action on Peiping”, New York Times, Jan. 19, 1951. 246 Ibid..

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declaring that Beijing’s replies were an attempt to blackmail the UN with the use of force,

Austin moved on to criticize Zhou’s latest reply, saying that it plainly showed that the PRC

regime admitted its full responsibility for sending its troops into Korea and its following actions:

“the absurd fiction that the Chinese Communist attack on Korea was being conducted by

individual volunteers has been abandoned.”247 For further dramatic effect, he even claimed that

“the Chinese Communist regime must regard the United Nations as a very trivial and

contemptible body.”248 Austin made a point of reminding his audience of who the Americans believed was the mastermind behind the Chinese intervention, telling them China’s “aggression is part of the world-wide pattern of centrally directed Soviet imperialism.” 249 He concluded that ,

“it is clear to my Government that the Peiping [Beijing] regime has committed aggression and

that the General Assembly must say so,” and “the Collective Measures Committee to consider

what future collective measures should be taken.”250

The consequences and implications of such resolution were tremendous and serious. For

instance, the Security Council had branded the North Korean regime as the aggressor in 1950

and it led to military intervention of UN forces on the peninsula. By labeling a country with

massive manpower and resources like China an aggressor, many diplomats worried the passage

of such a resolution would be the prelude of World War III, because an inevitable expansion of

the conflict would follow and then bring Soviet Union into the war, because it had signed a

military alliance with China.

The American move was met with some opposition or at least indifference from its major

247 Ibid.. 248 Ibid.. 249 Ibid.. 250 Ibid..

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allies. This was shown clearly when the US failed to elicit major sponsorship in submitting the resolution. Although about ten other countries were willing to join in sponsorship, Britain and

France were not ready to give their formal approval. The Americans felt that a sponsors list without Paris and London would give the impression of a deeper split among the major Western powers, and decided that the best thing to do would be to submit the resolution only under the name of the United States.251

The resolution draft submitted by Warren Austin included five points, yet the gist of it

could be summarized in two parts. The first part dealt with the issue of the aggression itself,

declaring that PRC government “by giving direct aid assistance to those who were already

committing aggression in Korea and by engaging in hostilities against United Nations forces

there, has itself engaged aggression in Korea.” The second part was about the sanctions, calling

for “a committee ... as a matter of urgency to consider additional measures to be employed to

meet this aggression and to report thereon to the General Assembly.”252 The focal point of debate

was not on the first part, because to Britain, India, and some other countries, the declaration itself

was unlikely to produce the expansion of the war, which was their main concern. Their focus

was on the second part, because the extent and nature of such measures could likely decide the

future of the war, and they were baffled by the ambiguity of the wording. Moreover, they were

worried that the resolution did not include any willingness to continue the ongoing negotiation

efforts, in which Zhou Enlai’s reply was interpreted by some diplomats as an encouraging signal

of Chinese communist attitude toward cease-fire. They approached China requesting clarification

of its response to the five-principle plan.

The Truman administration's haste was owing to the pressures of domestic politics, as

251 “Austin Acts Alone, Co-sponsorship Lacking”, New York Times, Jan. 21, 1951. 252 US Department of State. Bulletin, v. 24 (Jan. 29, 1951), p. 167.

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well as the pressures of Communist military advances. On January 19, the US House adopted, by

almost unanimous voice vote, a resolution urging that the UN immediately declare Communist

China an aggressor in Korea. Four days later on January 23, the Senate adopted a similar

resolution by a unanimous vote of 91 to 0.253 These were clear indications of the sentiment of

frustration and outrage of American politicians and the American public at large at what they

was as the slow reaction of UN in dealing the crises in the Far East. Yet the reason for the

increasing radicalization and aggressiveness of President Truman’s foreign policy had a deeper

origin. As Christensen points out, in order to secure public and congressional support for the

massive mobilization of national sources in military buildup in a peaceful time in addressing the

Soviet threats, President Truman needed to articulate a “grand strategy” in his foreign policy,

one in which his administration would often adopt “a more hostile or more ideological foreign

policy than they otherwise would prefer.” 254 Under this strategy, for example, George Kennan,

the well-known Soviet strategist, was often frustrated by the President Truman’s decisions in

putting resources in the Far East, an area he thought was peripheral to US interests.255 As

Christensen sees it, Kennan was an “politically insulated” specialist, and his realpolitik solution to the China UN seat issue failed to addressed the political and ideological needs of Truman’s administration in its crusade against Soviet expansionism. According to Christnesne, in a meeting on China at Statement Department, Kennan was “shouted down on this” by John F.

Dulles, who that time was the Republican adviser to the Secretary of State Department and who were enraged by Kennan’s proposal to offer Communist China an UN seat..256

253 Congressional Quarterly, China and US Far East policy, 1945-1966 (DC: CQ Inc.) , 55. Also, Stueck, Korean War, p. 155. 254 Christensen, Useful Adversaries, 4. 255 Ibid., 38. 256 Ibid., 177.

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Christensen’s analysis is insightful and illuminating, yet increasingly explosive external challenges, particularly the developing situation on the ground in Korea, were also directly related to the radicalization of American foreign policy. In a period of three months from late

October 1950 to late January 1951, the UN forces were on the defensive and then in full retreat after suffering huge causalities and losses in the three offensives of the Chinese-Korean forces,

the first two of which started with surprise attacks followed by tens of thousands of all-out

infantry encirclement and annihilation tactics. By the middle of January, the UN side not only

lost the whole of the newly occupied North Korean territories, but also withdrew further south to

the 37th parallel. It was evident that Communist China was getting fully involved in the Korean

War and that its goal was to drive the UN forces off of the peninsula. As the military situation

continued to worsen, a grave pessimism permeated the thinking of many top decision makers in

Washington, to whom the ultimate withdrawal from Korea seemed evitable although most of

them agreed to continue to hold militarily.257 In order to halt the Communist advance on the

battle field, Washington was desperate for some political and diplomatic offensives to

counterbalance their adversaries in Bejing and Moscow. United Nations was an arena in which

Washington had the enough leverage to initiate an offensive to trim down the aggressiveness of

Communist China, even though some minor oppositions existed. The most urgent task for the

American UN delegation in January, 1951, was to push its allies and friends to pass the

resolution to condemn Chinese aggression, in order to show US leadership in global politics, and

to restore what Austin called the united will of UN in the fight against Communism. American

haste and, to a degree, recklessness in its UN diplomacy must be understood in this context,

when American national security was under the immediate and serious threat.

257 Stueck, Korean War, 133.

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Broadly speaking, Communist military and diplomatic offensives raised worries not only

from the US, but also from most non-communist countries in the UN who were concerned about

the ambitions of Moscow and Beijing. The threatening tone of General Wu’s UN speech, the

crossing of the 38th parallel and the following the seizure of Seoul and Inchon were interpreted by many observers of the outside world as the beginning of Soviet world expansionism. Zhou’s replies and General Wu’s return statement, did not make any promise of cease-fire and did not

mention anything specific about their strategic goals beyond the UN seat and Taiwan issues. This

quite naturally raised great anxieties among UN diplomats. Therefore, to stop the advances of the

Communist offensives was not only a top priority of the US and its close allies, but also the

consensus of most neutral Arab-Asian countries, who showed their support in their later votes in

favor of the resolution condemning Chinese aggression. Many of these countries, although they

proposed strongly to add a clause to express UN’s goodwill to solve the conflict with peaceful

means and to delay any sanctions, they had no question in supporting American position in

proclaiming Communist China’s aggression in Korea and its breach of UN Chapters. For the

interests of Chinese communists, however, the aggression clause was as serious, if not more so,

as the sanction clause.

According to the currently available Chinese sources, Zhou had made seriously faulty

assessments about the mainstream of opinion among UN members, and about the probability of

the resolution’s being passed. He seemed quite sure that it would be very difficult for the

resolution to gain passage due to the split in the Western camp. In an internal speech addressed

to the local leaders of the CCP’s Manchurian branch on January 23, one week before the voting

on the aggressor resolution, Zhou explained in detail his assessment of the situation in the UN.

To begin with, he claimed that “the so-called most powerful and the last imperialist state in the

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world has been defeated by us,” although he mentioned the fact that many people in the

battlefield may have reservations on his claim.258 He emphasized that this defeat was so significant that it had not only caused a serious split among the American people and its government, it had also caused “unprecedented chaos in the imperialist bloc.” The internal split presented a “tremendous difficulty ” to President Truman’s war mobilization effort, so no matter how eagerly the American “ruling clique agitated for war, none of them proposed an attack on mainland China.”259

Externally, according to Zhou, US government also faced a deep split with other

members of the Western camp. In the case of the aggressor resolution, Zhou opined that “Britain

would not support it,” because the British had huge interests in China (investments and the

colony of Hong Kong), and they were extremely worried that Washington would neglect the

defense of Western Europe as the result of its overconcentration in Asia. And “broadly,

European capitalist countries would not agree the current pattern of development in Korea.” In the East, China’s neighboring countries, India, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, especially, India, were very anxious of the deterioration of Far East situation. Arab countries and part of African

countries were also very scared of war. Furthermore, many capitalist countries expressed their

neutrality. According to Zhou, the US could only maintain its hold in Latin American, yet those

countries played trivial roles in the international politics. As he saw it, India and Arab group

openly opposed to this resolution, and Iraq and the European group expressed their support only

superficially.260

What if the resolution passed? Zhou showed his contempt, saying that , “we already beat

258 Zhou, “the Reasons and Significances of CPV Military Victories”, in Jun shi wen xuan (Military Selected Works), vol. 1, p. 140. 259 Ibid., 143. 260 Ibid., 144.

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down the UN banner. Would we be intimidated by this condemnation?!” 261 He based his optimism on the confidence that Communist forces were able to advance to further victories on the Korean battlefield.

However, Zhou must have felt the pressure from the UN, and felt the need to continue to incite discord among the non-communist countries. Therefore, he needed to show some eagerness or sincerity in the talks. In a response to the Indian ambassador’s request for clarification of his reply to the UN’s Five-principle Plan, Zhou introduced the concept of

“limited cease-fire.” His proposal for the settlement of the Korean problem could be divide into two steps, and the first step would be an agreement of “a cease-fire for a limited time period,” which would be arranged by the first meeting of the Seven-Power Conference, for the convenience of the following negotiations. He also promised that if the all sides accepted the principle of the withdrawal of all foreign troops, the PRC government would be responsible to

“persuade” the CPV to return China. Moreover, although he reiterated the point that Beijing’s seat in United Nations must be guaranteed, he did not clearly state if this admission was a prerequisite for the start of seven-nation talks as he had in the last statement. All of these new revisions or concessions proved to be effective in creating new hopes among many UN members pursuing a settlement in Korea.

The Indians were thrilled by Zhou’s latest reply. On January 24, Prime Minister

Jawaharlal Nehru broadcasted a national radio speech to declare that he was “convinced” that

Beijing was “eager to have negotiations for the settlement of Korean and other problems of the

Far East,” and he urged an immediate conference of the powers concerned.262 Even before the arrival of this reply, New Delhi had already adopted a more flexible and open-minded attitude in

261 Ibid., 145. 262 “Indian Gives View,” New York Times, Jan 25, 1951.

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viewing Zhou’s January 17 reply than most non-communist countries. Indian ambassador to UN,

Sir Benegal Rau, told the audience of a meeting of UN Political and Security Committee that according to his government, Zhou’s reply “ is not an outright rejection of the principles approved by this committee. It is partly acceptance, partly non-acceptance, partly a request for elucidation, and partly a set of counter-proposals.”263Therefore he opposed the haste of

Americans’ move for an aggressor resolution.

On the other hand, the determined American diplomats would not show any signs of

conciliation. Warren Austin never gave up his suspicious and sarcastic attitude toward any

Chinese Communist offers. When he took the floor of the meeting, he declared that Zhou’s

latest reply was intended to “postpone, delay, procrastinate” action on the American proposal. He

questioned the status of the statement, which was a reply by Beijing to India, “not a message to

the Political Committee.” Austin teased, “It is not addressed to the United Nations, It is not much

more than a postal card would be.”264 In spite of his sarcastic tone, Austin did find the gap

between these statements. As sources show, Zhou’s first reply was a product of his intense

consultation with Moscow and Pyongyang, and sent to the chairman of the UN Political

Committee, yet the second was different: it was mailed to the Indian ambassador to the UN in

answer to his inquiry. From the perspective of the UN, Beijing’s second reply could not be

adopted as an official document. Even today, official publications in the are still quite evasive in

addressing the matter of the second reply: even Zhou’s chronicle has no mention of it. All of

these facts suggest that Zhou took the second reply as a tactical concession of an informal and

unofficial nature. He did not plan to revise the points he elaborated in the first reply. Instead, the

optimism inspired by the CPV’s victories led him to continue his diplomatic adventurism. On

263 “Text of Indian Delegate's Speech in UN,” New York Times, Jan 21, 1951. 264 “Statements by Rau and Austin in UN,” New York Times, Jan 23, 1951.

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January 27, in a meeting with Indian Ambassador to China, Panikkar, Zhou only reiterated the

hard lines that his government had held since last December, such as the US as the peace breaker

and aggressor, and the cease-fire as a plot.265

Yet the diplomatic currents in the UN had now became quite disadvantageous to Bejing.

In particular, London’s final stance on the American resolution was a disaster indeed. In a statement to the British House of Common, the Prime Minister explained the position of the

British government on Korea. Should the condition of setting up a committee of good offices to

explore “every possibility of a negotiated settlement” be met, the British government would

agree in “ condemning Chinese intervention in support of an aggressor, which has thwarted and

frustrated the purposes of the United Nations.”266 This new stance was unthinkable to Beijing’s

earlier assessment that Britain dared not to risk its interests in China and the colony of Hong

Kong in overtly supporting the US diplomatic offense.

On the eve of voting, on January 30, Beijing sent its strongest warning to the UN

Political and Security Committee via Indian Ambassador, Sir Rau, who told the diplomats there:

“I feel bound to mention that my Government has been informed on the highest authority that

once there is a condemnatory resolution, there is no hope of a peaceful settlement.”267 The threat

indicated that Communist China was determined to continue and expand the war. It was

understood that this “highest authority” was China’s top leader, Mao Zedong and probably Zhou,

Enlai as well, who usually conveyed the PRC’s messages via the Indian Ambassador in Beijing.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union and its European allies tried to express a more flexible

attitude than Beijing in order to undermine support for Washington. They voted for a resolution

265 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), January 27, 1951, pp 483-484. 266 Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), P. 388; “Text of Attlee's Statement on Korea”, New York Times, Jan. 24, 1951. 267 “Mao Warns Censure by UN Would Bar Peace,” New York Times, Jan 30, 1951.

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that was sponsored by the Arab-Asian group. The resolution proposed an exploratory Seven- power meeting, which was partly based on Zhou’s four-point proposal on January 17. Yet this resolution was rejected in the January 30 meeting of the Committee.268

Instead, the American-proposed resolution to condemn the PRC’s aggression in Korea was passed on the same night.269 Under tremendous pressures from US, the Resolution gained approval by an overwhelming majority of 47 for to 7 against, with 8 abstentions. Britain, France, and Canada voted in favor of the resolution. Among the 12 nations of the Arab-Asian group, only India and Burma maintained their opposition. Together with them were five Soviet bloc countries. Other than that, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon switched sides to join the West. The other six countries abstained: Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. Saudi Arabia did not participate in the voting.270 From these results, we may conclude that most of the nations of this group gave up their opposition at the last minute. The pressure from the US was unbearable to many of them. Syria was a good example. Its delegation was quite an active member in the Arab-Asian group. Faris Khouri, the Syrian Ambassador, had worked closely with his Indian counterpart Sir Rau. In a debate on January 29, Khouri warned, with an occasionally emotional tone, of the consequences if the US resolution was passed. He said, “cities would be lying in ruins, divisions of troops would be dying , 800 million Asian people would be ranged against the United States.”271 Yet ironically, Syria in the final voting decided to abstain in the resolution. It appears that the deterrent power of the CCP was not as effective as Zhou had expected.

268 “Asian Move Loses,” New York Times, Jan 31, 1951. 269 “The Vote on Red China,” New York Times, Jan 31, 1951. 270 Ibid.. 271 “Mao Warns Censure by UN Would Bar Peace,” New York Times, Jan 30, 1951.

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3.9 The Impact and Implications of the Aggressor Resolution

The passage of the aggressor resolution had tremendous impact on and implications for

the war in Korea and the future of the PRC’s international environment. First, it legalized the

military actions of UN forces in dealing with Chinese troops in Korea under the name of

resistance to Chinese aggression. In so doing, it increased the morale of UN soldiers and

facilitated the undergoing UN counter-offensive both morally and legally. Second, it dissolved the Communist myth that Chinese troops were “volunteers” whose behavior PRC government could not be responsible for. The resolution found that PRC government had been giving direct

aid and assistance to these “volunteers.”

Third, in the long run, the aggressor resolution seriously reduced the chances that the

question of the People’s Republic’s admission into UN could be resolved. According to UN

charter,a country desiring to become a UN member must be a peace-loving state. Even the

current member states may be suspended or expelled from the organization if found guilty of

violating UN principles. The prime principle or the purpose of UN is “ to maintain international

peace and security.” 272 Since the PRC was branded as the aggressor against UN “peace-keeping

efforts,” it would be extremely difficult for it to gain admission as a member until it

acknowledged committing aggression and withdrew the troops, which was impossible or

unthinkable in the context of early 1950s, because it would probably have led to the collapse of

the regime.

Fourth, the passage of the aggressor resolution would make it impossible to resolve the

Taiwan issue in the foreseeable future. Any resolution would have to wait until Communist

forces were able to decisively defeat American forces in Korea, which was also impossible if we

272 Article 1, Chapter I, Chapter of United nations, see the UN official website: http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml

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consider the reports of Peng Dehuai. Although the Resolution was, strictly speaking, only

applicable to Korea, it implied a negative image of PRC as an aggressor or warmonger at large.

The US in turn made use of this connotation as fundamental moral and geo-political reason for

protecting the regime on Taiwan. The neutralization of Taiwan Strait not only became

consolidated, but also attained a new function as the front line of the Western crusade against

Communist expansionism.

Fifth, together with another resolution passed in the following May, the resolution helped

created an embargo of military and strategic materials to Mainland China. This embargo further

developed into virtually an economic isolation of the PRC from the outside world except the

Soviet Bloc. At the height of tensions in the mid-1950s, more than 47 countries joined this

embargo. This sanction had tremendous impact on the Chinese economy, especially in the coastal regions where exports and foreign trade were a pivotal part of local and regional economies and thus of vital importance to people’s daily lives.

Although it took some time for these impacts to be felt to their fullest extent, the

Communist leaders did feel painfully the embarrassment and threats that this resolution brought

to them. Their responses were expectedly strong and threatening. On February 2, 1951, Zhou

attacked that the aggressor resolution as “illegal, slanderous, null and void and the Chinese

people firmly express their opposition.” As in the message he had sent to the UN via India in late

January, he threatened that this move would “block the path to a peaceful settlement” in Korea.

Hence, in response to the last clause of the Aggressor Resolution that called for the continuation

of the peace negotiation by setting up a UN Goodwill Office, Zhou he said his government

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would pay no heed to any overtures sent by that office.273

The resolution so embarrassed Zhou that on February 19, he proposed to add a sentence

to the Chinese report to the first meeting of World Peace Council (WPC), which Guo Moruo, a

well-known Chinese author, was scheduled to deliver in Berlin. The sentence read, “The WPC

should demand the General Assembly of United Nations cancel its shameful resolution that

slandered the PRC as the aggressor.”274 By appealing to the collective will of this pro-communist organization, Zhou tried to win some international moral support as a leverage to counterbalance

China’s setbacks in the UN.

In Moscow, the aggressor resolution raised grave concern and anxiety on the part of the

Soviet leadership, who worried that Washington’s recent reckless diplomatic move might be an indication that the Americans had determined to start an all-out world war against the

Communists. As a deterrent measure, , Stalin issued a personal statement to express his comments on this Resolution on February 17, 1952. The statement was published with the form of an interview with a correspondent of Pravda, the official newspaper of Soviet Communist

Party, yet a close look on the whole text suggests that it was likely that Stalin drafted the questions and answers by himself.275 In hindsight, this is a fine example of well-rounded

deterrence. On the one hand, Stalin attacked the aggressor resolution as “a scandalous decision”

by a problematic world organization, which he warned had declined to the status of an

instrument of war, a tool of Americans, who were unleashing “a new world war” for the interests

of “billionaires and millionaires” who took war as a source of super-profits. Moreover, he

273 Zhou, “Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai’s Statement about the Slanderous Resolution on China Illegally Passed by the UN Fifth General Assembly,” February2, 1951, in Zhong mei guan xi zi liao (China-US Relations Documents), vol.1 , pp 392-394. 274 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), February 19, 1951, p. 488. 275 “Text of Stalin Talk on World Affairs,” New York Times, Feb 17, 1951.

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threatened that the war in Korea would end with the defeat of the English and American

“interventionists” because the war was very unpopular among “generals, soldiers,” and the

people in those countries.276 On the other hand, he provided assurances that the Soviet Union

would not start the new world war and that peace was still the goal of Soviet foreign policy. To

support his assurance, he mentioned Soviet “demobilization of its troops,” Soviet efforts in

pursuit of peace and disarmament, and the Soviet need for a propaganda campaign to appeal to

the people in the Western camp for peace. Especially, when asked if a world war would be

unavoidable, he answered, “No. At least, one can, at present, hold it to be not unavoidable.” He

concluded this interview with saying that his country “will continue to carry through the politics

of preventing war and keeping peace.”277 Overall, this statement was more a peace overture than

a war proclamation. Similar with Washington, Moscow wanted to restrict the war by clarifying

their actions as defense nature in order to safeguard “peace.”

3.10 Communist Willingness for a Cease-fire

The unprecedented response of Stalin and Zhou, on the other hand, showed that the passage of this resolution in such an unexpectedly swift and hasty fashion was indeed a surprise to the Communist’s, inasmuch as it upset their earlier calculations. They had underestimated

Washington‘s influence in the UN and overestimated their leverage on the neutral countries and

Britain. Since UN diplomacy failed to achieve satisfactory results, the only option available to the Communists to reverse this predicament was to initiate a military gamble. In a telegram to

Stalin in late January, Mao reported his military plan: “we must spend two or three months in the preparation, so than we can release the decisive and the last offensive, namely, the Fifth

276 Ibid.. 277 Ibid..

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Campaign.”278 In another telegram to Stalin on March 1, Mao explained in details the Chinese rotation for military deployments in Korea, the concept of which had appeared in early February.

The first wave would be the 10 armies (30 divisions) currently fighting in Korea. The second wave of troops would be 9 armies (27 divisions), which would “be deployed to the 38th parallel in about the first half of April.” The third wave troops would include 10 armies, which would be deployed in June.279

The Communist Fifth Campaign (or the Spring Offensive of 1951) was launched on April

22, with the goals of annihilating “three American divisions (1st, 23rd, and 24th), three British and

Turkish brigades, and the South Korean 1st, 3rd, and 6th Divisions.” 280 The first Phase lasted

until April 29, and the main thrust was put on the western front with the forces of 11 Chinese

armies. It achieved only limited success. Although the Communists occupied the Kaesong area

to the north of Seoul, they “did not annihilate any American regiment, but only destroyed 6 or 7

American battalions.” 281 The main cause of this limited success lay in the pathetic poor

equipments of the CPV. In this phase, up to ten American regiments were encircled respectively

by Communist forces at nights in various locations. Because Communist forces failed to

annihilate these units overnight due to their poor firepower, after dawn, the battlefield became

advantageous to the UN forces with their vast superiority in armor, artillery and air cover. All of

278 “Mao Zedong Telegram to Stalin Concerning Questions of the Planning of the Fourth Campaign,” Jan. 28, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, pp. 673-674. 279 “Mao Zedong Telegram to Stalin Concerning the Policy of Rotation Warfare in Korea,” March 1, 1951, in Shen, E guo dang an (Russian Archives), vol. 2, pp. 706-708. 280 “Peng Telegram to Army Corpses,” April 21, 1951, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life) , P. 492. 281 Peng, Dehuai, Peng de huai zi shu (Self-accounts of Peng Dehuai 彭德怀自述), Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1981), p. 262. A full English translation of Peng’s memoir on Korean War could be found Xiaobing Li etc., ed., Mao’s Generals Remember Korea (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), Chapter 2.

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these ten regiments were able to break the encirclement and none of them was destroyed.282

Disappointed with the result, Peng secretly relocated his armies to the eastern front and initiated

the second phase of attack there on May 16, with the target being the South Korean forces. It

proved to be successful with two South Korean divisions being largely annihilated and another

two being defeated. 283

The most serious crisis that the Chinese Communist forces met since entering the Korean

War occurred during their retreat back to the north. Taking advantage of their superiority in

mobility, firepower, and their relatively high morale, the UN forces counterattacked in

unprecedented speed and scale. Unprepared for this type of counterattack, the exhausted Chinese

forces’ line fell into chaos, and further deteriorated to the verge of collapse at the end of May. In

a report to Mao on June 1, Peng Dehuai said, “the 3rd Army Corps suffered massive losses. The

soldiers fled everywhere and tried to go back to China. We had sent troops along the way to stop

them [deserters].....the 60th Army was even weaker. ”284 In particular, the 180th Division in this

army corps was encircled and then annihilated by the UN forces along the route of retreat.

Peng’s telegrams to Mao and Stalin, and the accounts of his chronicle during this period indicate

the gravity of the situation at the front: the logistical difficulties, the serious ”rightist sentiment ”

(a communist euphemism for the fear of American forces) among some commanders, and the

poor communications. Taking the fear issue as an example, in a telegram to Beijing, Peng

reported that “Some cadres think it impossible to destroy any large numbers of enemies without

the support of airplanes, artillery, and tanks. They complain why no air force has showed up,

why there is no armor or artillery support. ..Some cadres showed serious rightist sentiments.

282 Yao, Cong yao lu jiang dao bang men dian (From Yalu River to Panmunjom), p. 74 283 Ibid. 75. 284 “Peng Telegram to Mao,” June 1, 1951, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life), p. 503.

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They evaded or even refused to enforce orders; their relations with their soldiers were abnormal;

breaches of disciplines are quite phenomenal.”285 In another telegram about the retreat decision

in the Fifth Campaign, Peng expressed harsh criticism of these feelings of fear, writing that

“some commanders failed to move with their main offense units so as to provide timely

commands and assistances. On the contrary, they kept far from their troops, and that is the reason

for the unnecessary chaos and losses. Their behavior has impacted the morale of our whole

forces tremendously.” 286 Only after desperate efforts with massive human costs were the

Communists forces able to stabilize their front lines in mid-June.

In addition to the crisis at the front line, the Communists were also anxious that the UN forces would initiate an amphibious landing in their rear, a strategy that General Macarthur had adopted in Inchon last year and that had brought him stunning success in defeating the North

Korean troops. With these worries in mind, Mao suggested in his telegram to Stalin on May

27that China withdraw its troops back from the current lines in order to revive the CCP’s traditional retreat-encircle-destroy tactic. He admitted that Communist soldiers were not equipped enough to destroy the American forces even to the level of a regiment, let alone the level of a division, which he had repeatedly required Peng to accomplish in the CPV’s offensives.

Instead, he proposed to readjust the goal down to the level of annihilating enemy battalions or a slightly larger units. He argued that this strategy (beginning with small scale annihilation and later moving on to large scale annihilation) was a necessary and effective approach which the

Chinese Communist forces had employed in their civil war experience in destroying some of

Chiang Kai-shek’s most powerful forces, “the New 1st Army, the New 6th Army, the 5th Army,

285 “Telegram to CCP Central Committee”, May 25, 1951, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life), p. 498. 286 “Telegram to Armies Commanders and to CCP Central Military Committee”, May 31, 1951, in Wang, ed., Peng de huai nian pu (A chronicle of Peng Dehuai's Life), Pp 501-502.

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and the 8th Army.”287With regard to the question of where to draw the new ideal engagement line

after the proposed retreat, Mao suggested that “the further northwards the enemy moves, the

better, as long as no further than the Wosan-Pyongyang line,” which was slightly more than 100

miles to the north of the current engagement line.288 According to a report to Stalin by Major

General Kochergin, a Soviet advisor to Chinese army, Peng Dehuai even “considered

withdrawing his troops back to the bank of Yalu River, because within such short distance [from

Chinese border], he would have better chance to destroy Americans.”289 In the same report, the

Soviet general called on Stalin to pay attention to the pessimistic morale among the Chinese

troops: “Chinese comrades are anxious if the enemy would land in the rear, so they deploy many

of their forces along the coastlines, and they do not want to advance further into the South. In a

half joking tone, they say that they would prepare a 10-year war in Korea because only in such a

protracted war, they may be able to take attrition from enemy. They think it impossible to defeat

the enemy in a short time.”290

Stalin was clearly outraged by these telegrams. In a harsh tone, he bluntly rejected

Mao’s proposal: “I think your plan is adventurous. Such a tactic could only gain success once or

twice… But now this would be the 4th time that you want to repeat this tactic.” Stalin suggested that strategies derived from the Chinese Civil War experience would not work in Korea

“Because the Anglo-American troops could easily recognize your tactic and then readjust their

287 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning the Question of Only Conducting Small-scale Annihilation Attacks on British-American Troops,” May 27, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, pp. 673-674.,Pp. 772-773. 288 Ibid.. 289 “Kochergin Report on Conditions of Chinese forces”, June 16, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, pp. 817 290 Ibid..

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deployments” to fill and reinforce the gaps between their frontlines.291If the enemy responded in

the fashion that Stalin predicted, the Chinese Communists’ mobile warfare and the tactic of

retreat-lure-ambush-encircle-destroy-advance would no longer be effective.292 Moreover, Stalin

refuted in a sarcastic tone the validity of Mao’s analogy of Chiang Kai-shek to Korean War:

“first, you are facing a totally different army. Second, there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe that the Anglo-American armies would be as stupid as Chiang Kai-shek to let you choose your target freely to destroy their battalions one by another.”293 In another telegram to Mao one week later, Stalin continued to express his repudiation. This time, his target was the “serious rightist sentiment” in Chinese army. He said, “I think the cause of this mood is the fact that you frequently adopted the limited mobile tactic of advancing forward a little bit and then retreating back, which created an impression among Chinese-Korean armies that they are weak, and created another impression among Anglo-American armies that they are strong. I worry that this would be detrimental to the morale of Chinese-Korean armies.” 294In the same telegraph, Stalin

expressed in the strongest terms his discontent or even anger over the Chinese comrades’ routine

complaints of how poor their firepower and equipments were: “two months ago, I have notified

you that the Poles had cancelled their order, therefore we can provide extra supplies to you, and

accordingly we can increase our military loan in the year of 1951….you said you would send

291 “Stalin Telegram to Mao Concerning Question of Tactics against Anglo-American Forces”, May 29, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 774. 292 For a disucssion of Mao’s military mobile war strategy and tactics, see Shu Guang Zhang, Mao's military romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953 ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), Chapter 2. 293 Ibid.. 294 “Stalin Telegram to Mao concerning questions of Defensive Operations,” June 5, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2 , p. 784.

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your new orders very soon. But until now, we have received none of them. What happened?

What is the reason?”295

Although initially Stalin was deeply frustrated by these reports, he later also admitted the reality of the battlefield to his Chinese counterparts. The deteriorating front lines, the worries of possible landings to the rear, the inherent logistical difficulties--all these and other dramatic

military developments brought the cease-fire and peace negotiations back to life. A cease-fire arrangement now became much more attractive and necessary to the Communist leaders because the confidence that had made them bluntly reject the UN truce offer 4 months earlier had now evaporated. In a telegram dated June 13, Stalin notified Mao, “we think that a cease-fire at the current time is a good thing.”296

On the other hand, Washington never gave up the concept of limited war in Korea and

the goal of ending the war without political concessions. In the context of the new military

situation, they gained more confidence in this pursuit. On May 31, the State Department Soviet

expert, George Kennan, who was then on leave of absence at Princeton University, made a

informal and secret visit to Jacob Malik in New York.297 Kennan suggested a cease-fire along the

existing battle lines with a sort of supervisory commission to guarantee against the renewal of

hostilities. He repeated Washington’s position that this truce arrangement must not relate to any

wider political issues, such as the withdrawal for foreign troops from Korea, the Taiwan

problem, or China’s UN seat. Malik replied that Kennan’s statement had nothing new, and

repeatedly mentioned the rights of the PRC, which made Kennan speculated that the Soviets felt

295 Ibid.. 296 “Stalin Telegram to Mao Concerning Questions of Cease-fire and Use of Air Force,” June 13, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 806. 297 Callum MacDonald, “Kennan-Malik Conversations,” in Matray ed., Historical Dictionary of the Korean War, p. 219.

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inhibited about discussing a cease-fire before consultation with their Chinese ally.298

Kennan‘s overture came at the right time. Beijing was now desperate for a halt to the UN

offensive. Four days later, on June 3, 1951, Mao and Kim Il-sung discussed their policy on cease-fire negotiation in Beijing. 299 In his directive (drafted by Zhou) on June 13 to a meeting of

Chinese and Korean Communists then working to coordinate their truce negotiation efforts, Mao

clearly expressed his desire for a cease-fire even at the cost of dropping the issues of China’s UN

representation and Taiwan from the agenda. He said, “[we should require] the restoration of the

38th parallel as the boundary [rather than asking the UN forces to get out of the Korean

Peninsula]….Regarding the issue of China’s admission to UN, we do not think we need to raise

it as the condition [of the negotiation]…If the Americans insist the Taiwan issue should be

solved separately, we would like to make that concession accordingly.”300In other words, the

Chinese Communist Party decided to drop two of their most wanted concessions from US,

concessions that had been central to their foreign policy only a few months earlier.

The immediate reason for this dramatic concession was disclosed in the same telegram:

“We have ordered…to hold the existing lines firmly. Continue to build up in June and July. In

August we plan to initiate a mid-level offensive.” 301 In short, China’s goal in this cease-fire, if achieved, was to gain a breathing time and to regroup its troops for further offensives—precisely

the same ploy that Zhou Enlai had accused the UN forces of having tried to play when they were

proposing cease-fire terms. Different from the cease-fires mediated by General Marshall in 1946

in China’s civil war, now it was Communists rather than Nationalists or Americans that wanted

298 Stueck, Korean War, p. 206. 299 Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), June 3, 1951, p. 499. 300 “Mao Telegram to Gao Gang and Kim Il-sung Concerning the Question of Cease-fire Negotiation,” June 13, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 808. 301 Ibid..

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an immediate cease-fire in order to stabilize the front and regroup their worn-out frustrated

troops. On the more fundamental level, the decision was made from at least two weaknesses of

the PRC, as Mao confessed in another cable to Stalin on July 20. First, “if the war continues…we

would face a massive budget crisis.”302 According to another of Mao’s telegrams (drafted by

Zhou Enali) in November1951, in order to cover the costs of Korean War, Communist China had

increased its 1951 fiscal year budget by 60% from the previous year , and up to 32% of the new

budget was spent “directly” on the Korean War. The “indirect” costs and the massive Soviet

military loans were not calculated into the budget.303 The second weakness that Mao confessed

was the limit of China’s military might: “our armed forces are only able to drive the enemy out

of North Korea, but not out of South Korea… If we can drive the enemy out of South Korea in a

period of time, such as half of year or eight months, we would like to pay the cost even it may

cause crises. Yet until now we cannot see such possibility.”304

Jacob Malik broadcast Communist willingness for a cease-fire to the outside world on

June 23 in a radio address named “Price of Peace,” which was sponsored by UN. After the

standard lengthy attacks on American foreign policy and the reaffirming of the Soviet Union as a

peace loving country, he came to the gist of his address: “the Soviet people wanted to strengthen

peace and believed that the most acute problem of the day, Korea, could be settled. As a first step,

discussions should be started among the belligerents for a cease-fire and an armistice providing for the mutual withdrawal of forces from the thirty-eighth parallel.”305 Consistent with the Stalin-

302 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning the Question of Withdrawal of Foreign Troops” (drafted by Zhou) July 20, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 903. 303 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning Questions of Korean Cease-fire Negotiation and China’s Domestic Conditions, “ November 14, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 3, pp. 1102-1103. 304 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning the Question of Withdrawal of Foreign Troops,” July 20, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 904. 305 “Text of Statement Broadcast by Malik on 'the Price of Peace’”, June 24, 1951, New York Times.

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Mao accords, the statement did not attach any political conditions to the cease-fire, which provided a common ground with the Americans, who had been advocating such a concept since

General Wu’s sojourn in New York in the previous year.

After painfully dropping the pre-conditions of the UN seat and Taiwan, Beijing’s leaders felt it necessary to maintain at least one of their previous political conditions for the sake of saving dignity (“mian zi” or “face” in Chinese) and China’s geo-political security. This was the condition that all foreign troops should be withdrawn from Korea, which Beijing thought was more relevant to the war and thus might be easier for the UN side to accept. When the Truce

Talks were first convened in Kaesong on July 10, North Korean General Nan Il, the

Communists’ nominal top negotiator (the back-scene top director was Chinese General Li

Kenong) proposed to list the withdrawal of foreign troops as Article III of the Agenda.306 Vice

Admiral Charles Turner Joy, who was the head of the UN negotiators, rejected that proposal by saying that it was beyond the authorization of the delegation, which was strictly confined to the cease-fire alone.307 According to the observations of Admiral Joy, Communist concept of agenda was sharply different from what Americans understood. The Chinese understanding of an

“agenda as a set of favorable conclusions” rather than the American understanding of an “agenda as only a list of topic to be discussed” was part of the root of why the Communists tried to impose the 38th parallel as the demarcation line and include the withdrawal of foreign troop into

the agenda, all of which simply meant that the agenda was “loaded”308 from the perspective of

306 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning the No.1 Briefing of the Armistice Negotiation,”(Drafted by Zhou), July 11, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 862. 307 Charles Turner Joy, How Communists Negotiate (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 20. 308 Ibid., pp. 18-19. In his book, Admiral Joy uses the baseball game as a vivid analogy to illustrate the vast gap between Communists and Americans on the concept of agenda. In a baseball game arrangement meeting, Americans might agree on a 3-article agenda, 1, Place the game is to be played, 2, Time the game is to start, 3, Selection of

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Joy. Moreover, Washington worried that if the UN forces were withdrawn from Korea,

Communist China would be able to send massive reinforcements to North Korea from

Manchuria in a swift manner.309

In the following sessions, the withdrawal of foreign troops became the critical problem.

In his telegram to the Communist delegation in Kaesong (under the name of Mao) on July 17,

1951, Zhou confessed the purpose of the Communists’ uncompromising position on this issue:

“in the past few days, we have made a few concessions in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), media

coverage, and agenda issue, so it is likely that they got an illusion that if we would make more

concessions if they continue to oppose to discuss any issue of our interest… You must struggle

with them for another two or three days.”310 Here we can see that Zhou only took this issue as a

tactic to counterbalance the negotiation table, or just for “saving face,” rather than a basic

principle that the Communists would never betray. Even Zhou himself now became much more

practical than he had been six months ago. Not surprisingly, six days later, on July 23, in another

telegram to the delegation, Zhou directed that “regarding the withdrawal of foreign troops, we

may agree that it can be left for another meeting for solution after the cease-fire, and may not be included into the agenda of this meeting.”311 So in this way, the Communists themselves

dropped all of the pre-conditions that Zhou demanded in the UN cease-fire offers. The historical

reality is, except for the China’s UN seat problem got solved in 1971, none of other issues has

umpires. Communists, however, would submit an agenda like this: 1 Agreement that game is to be played in Shanghai, 2 Agreement that game be played at night, 3 Agreement that umpires be Chinese officials. See his book, p. 18. 309 Kang Non, “Kaesong Truce Talks,”, in Matray ed., Historical Dictionary of the Korean War, p. 213. 310 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning Questions of Armistice Negation Agenda” (drafted by Zhou), July 18, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 887. Also, Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), July 17, 1951, p. 501. 311 “Mao Telegram to Stalin Concerning the Question of Withdrawal of Foreign Troops” (drafted by Zhou) July 20, 1951, in Shen, ed., E guo dang an (Russian Archives),vol. 2, p. 904. Also, Zhou En lai nian pu (Chronicle of Zhou Enlai 1949-1976), July 17, 1951, p. 501

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been solved although Korean War has ended for more than half of a century.

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CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

Korean War was indeed a brand new challenge for CCP and its regime. For the first time,

CCP leadership had to make its military and diplomatic strategy and tactics in an international environment, rather than in a civil war context, as had been the case since its birth three decades ago in 1921. Therefor, the continuities and changes of CCP’s embedded civil war mentality in such an international conflict in Korean Peninsular is an interesting and important topic in our understanding of CCP’s diplomatic-military behaviors in the rest of Mao’s years of PRC (who died in 1976). Actually, since its entering into the War in October 1950, CCP adopted a series of military strategies and foreign policies in order to defeat UN/US forces and gain its diplomatic goals. The earlier chapters have conducted a detailed examination and analysis on these polices and processes. The discussion of the intricacies of Communist China’s military and diplomatic thinking, behavior, and as well as the international efforts in the UN diplomacy, suggests a three- point conclusion.

4.1 The Immaturity of the PRC’s Diplomatic System

The PRC established a highly centralized system, which means there was very limited authorization available for the front line diplomats, yet such system was convenient for the top leaders at the center, who were concerned that their policies and intentions be implemented swiftly and directly. Communist China’s diplomats were marked by a high degree of immaturity due to their lack of diplomatic training and experience and to their military background. They were more generals and soldiers than diplomats. They were better-prepared to fight than to talk or negotiate. In addition, there was an intimate diplomatic alliance of the PRC

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and Soviet Union during this period. Within this alliance, Soviet Union played a leading role.

Stalin had supreme authority over the UN delegation and truce issues. Zhou was much more

active and more directly involved in diplomatic issues than Mao, although the latter still had the

ultimate power if he wanted to intervene. Under Zhou’s highly nationalistic “diplomacy as a

struggle/war” doctrine, China adopted a provocative and aggressive attitude toward the Western

bloc, especially toward the US. This attitude, when pushed to the extreme, even compromised

China’s united front strategy.

The regime’s foreign apparatus was in the first stages of its formation, characterized by immaturity, lack of experience, and lack of trained diplomats. Although many other new regimes experienced similar problems, the Chinese Communist’s revolutionary attitude and policies toward the foreign service agencies and personnel of the former Nationalist government indicated that the new apparatus had a long way to go to become to be competent and mature enough to deal with the challenges that the new regime faced in early 1950s. Infuriated by modern China’s history of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, the Communists adopted a hard line toward the “imperialist countries” that had signed “unequal treaties” with China, such as Britain, France, Japan, and United States. It refused to discuss any possibility of establishing formal diplomatic relations until those states agreed to abolish those treaties and abandon all their “illegal” interests in China. This hostile policy was intentionally designed to create an image of the new regime as the comprising guardian of the Chinese people’s interests and dignity. It was ready to meet diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions from the West in order to do so. Diplomatic isolation did take place when the United States decided to implement a non- recognition policy toward the People’s Republic, and to continue to support the Nationalist government, which had now retreated to the island of Taiwan. From the perspective of the

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newly-enrolled, ill-trained diplomats of the Beijing regime, this isolation shrank drastically the opportunities that they otherwise would have been able to take advantage of to hone their skills and expand their knowledge base in dealing with the West in the coming decades.

Another factor that caused this immaturity was the CCP’s policy toward the old diplomatic system and its staff of the Nationalist government. The Party regarded the old system as a shameful legacy of the old China and hence a target for complete destruction. In the propaganda of the new regime, the Nationalist diplomatic apparatus was an example of failure, incompetence, corruption, or even a stooge of the foreign powers, responsible for having sold out Chinese national interests and territory. Its staff, as whole, were problematic and unreliable in terms of Party allegiance, national loyalty, and moral correctness. Many of whom were either members of GMD, or, even worse, were compromised by their close relationships with the foreign powers. As a result, the former diplomatic personnel were either dismissed, imprisoned, or simply shot, and those lucky enough to keep their jobs were demoted and worked under the skeptical eyes of their new Communist overlords. This restructuring process created a tremendous loss of talent for the Chinese foreign service. In order to fill this vast number of vacancies, the leadership recruited cadres from its military, civil service, as well colleges graduates to assumes these positions. These novices generally lacked the necessary training, skills and experience to be effective diplomats.

4.2 Military Adventurism

Mao’s command of Communist troops in Korean War was characterized by a military adventurism which affected and spilled over into his supervision of the diplomatic struggle. This ungrounded adventurism began in mid-December 1950, when he ordered to Peng’s troops to

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cross the 38th parallel in a rushed manner, and only ended in July 1951, when the frustrated Mao looked for all possible means to stop the advance of the UN troops, which led to the start of

Kaesong truce talks. For more than six months, Mao’s goal was to expel the UN forces from the peninsula by destroying a significant portion of American ground troops.

The origin of all the miscalculations that Mao made in this period was that he applied his civil war command experience to the wrong enemy in the wrong place. In campaigns such as the

“four crossings of Chishui River” in the Long March and the deployment of Lin Biao’s forces in the Pingjin Campaign in late 1948, Mao emphasized the importance of mobility, the surprise attack, and the endurance of hardship and fatigue. Meanwhile, his civil war experience told him that logistical needs could be met either from local populace (such as clothes, food, shelter, money) or from the enemy (arms and ammunition). Moreover, Mao underestimated the tremendous impact of artillery, tanks, and air power, all areas in which the American forces were far superior to the Communist troops. By applying these doctrines, Mao created a huge gap between his optimism and the realities in the battlefield. Seated securely in Beijing, far from the battlefield, he failed to give fair attention to logistical problems, and neglected the extent to which the narrow shape of the Korean peninsula would limit the Chinese troops’ ability to use limits to encirclement tactics. He also failed to pay sufficient attention to the fundamental disparities between the KMT forces and American forces, the latter of which was not only a modernized army with superiority in naval and air forces, in tanks and artillery, but also an army without the incurable corruption and factional struggles that were inherent in the KMT troops.

Even as late as May 1951, in one of his cables to Stalin, Mao still assumed that the US troops were approximately at the same level of the best KMT troops, such as the New 1st Army, the

New 6th Army in Manchuria in late 1948. He should have realized that a new set of strategy and

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tactics would be required in dealing with this new type of warfare; otherwise, there was little

possibility of victory. From mid-December on, buoyed by the surprising success of the Second

Campaign, Mao continued to push Peng to maintain the offensives to not only cross the Parallel,

but also to destroy four to five American divisions, with the final goal of solving all Far East

issues with a single, all-out military effort. The more practical Peng opposed to Mao’s plan. He

requested a halt of at least two to three months for his exhausted troops to get reinforced. He

warned Mao of the possible traps set by the well-planned retreats of UN forces. He also

complained in anger of the poor, unreliable logistical situation. In late January, encouraged by

the Zhou’s counter proposal to the UN’s five-principle plan, Peng went so far as to ask for

Mao’s approval to announce an immediate cease-fire for Communist forces, an action that he thought he troops desperately needed. Yet all of these warnings could not change the mindset of

Mao and Stalin about their adversary. After two months of massive military buildup, in April,

1951, with nearly 1 million forces, Mao made the most ambitious attempt to defeat the UN forces by initiating the Fifth Campaign. However, although it had plenty of manpower, the CPV remained plagued by a plethora of other unsolved and, for the time being, unsolvable problems.As a result, this campaign not only failed to recover the offensive position that had been lost since late January, but also it brought the defense line to the verge of collapse in late

May after the panicked Communist forces fled back to the North. Only with this disaster did

Mao’s military adventurism come to a dishonorable end,too late to avoid disastrous and immeasurable impact on China’s diplomatic situation in New York.

4.3 Diplomatic Adventurism

In the wartime environment, Communist assessment of the military situation became a

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dominant factor in the making of Beijing’s foreign policy. The ebbs and flows of Communist

military adventurism were reflected in the rise and fall of a spirit of optimism among Beijing’s

leaders as they dealt with the challenges of UN diplomacy and the broad issue of PRC’s

diplomatic future. The first year of the Korean War saw the advent of the diplomatic thinking

and behavior, which this study refers to as “diplomatic adventurism.” Its core features are as

follows. First, the leaders held the belief that with a single, all-out effort, China could force the

United Nations to accept all its political conditions before agreeing to any cease-fire agreement.

In this way they believed that the PRC was likely to solve its major diplomatic problems, such as

withdrawal of foreign forces from Taiwan and Korea, recognition of the PRC, and China’s seat

in UN,. In addition, the CCP assumed that a gap or even split existed between the US and its

allies (such as Britain) and that the neutral countries (some European states and the newly

independent Arab-Asian states mediated by India), and the CCP would able to take advantage of this gap or split to stop the passage of the China aggressor resolution. Moreover, Chinese leaders held an uncompromising attitude toward US, and failed to provide any assurances to American concerns, such as its ultimate intentions of intervention in Korea and its relationship to Moscow.

On the military level, we can see that this diplomacy echoes military adventurism. To begin with, it features an overestimate of Communist bargaining power, which is evidenced by the refusal to work with the UN 3-man cease-fire group, and Zhou’s drafting of five truce

conditions, conditions which the United States could not possibly accept. Second, the CCP

seriously underestimated American diplomatic influence and bargaining power in the United

Nations. This was true when Wu Xiuquan’s proposed resolution condemning American invasion

on Taiwan and Korea was easily defeated in the Security Council meeting on November 30,

1950. Evidence could also be found in January 1951, when the United Nations Assembly was

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debating the Aggressor resolution proposed by the US. Zhou Enlai implied that it would be difficult for the resolution to gain passage because of the worries of Britain, India, and the other

Arab-Asian countries, yet to his surprise, the resolution gained passage easily.

At the ideological level, this adventurism was a deviation from Marxist-Leninist doctrine on the capitalist states, which held that an uncompromising incompatibility exists between socialist states and capitalist states, and hence the basic form of relations of these two types of states is confrontation although some type of coexistence even cooperation may be possible on a tactical basis, such as the use of united front strategy in dissolving the solidarity among the capitalist adversaries.. In essence, a strict interpretation of Marxist-Leninist doctrine would hold that the capitalist economies, bourgeoisie ideology and bourgeois political structure of these countries would ensure that they would view communism as their common enemy, and that they would therefore overcome any factors leading to disunity in order to unite in solidarityin combating their common adversary. Tracing the decision making process of Communist foreign policy in Korean War, we see that Beijing breached these doctrines, and went in the opposite direction, namely, toward adventurism. Zhou assumed that the contradictions within the capitalist bloc had grown to a state of open conflict level and that the CCP would be able to take advantage this rift. This assumption can be seen in Zhou’s assessments of the attitudes of Britain,

India, and the Asia-Arab group countries toward the aggressor resolutions, in which he predicted that these states were not willing to support the US. Zhou failed to admit the fact that no matter how strongly those countries opposed Washington’s China policy, they were capitalist countries, and their inborn hatred and fear of Communism would not allow them to tolerate Communist

China’s to repeated attempts to blackmail the UN and to thwart its collective will. As a result,

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Zhou was dangerously overconfident in his ability to manipulate the neutral or “swing” states in the UN, which were in fact no more than bourgeois nationalist regimes.

The root of this diplomatic adventurism was Beijing’s belief that military means alone could solve any other problems including diplomatic problems, such as their isolation by the

West, the question of UN representation, and the Taiwan issue. The Communist civil war experience had strengthened this belief, when Mao proclaimed that political regime grew from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party’s victory over the KMT and the founding of the PRC regime in 1949 had crowned this militarism (or military supremism) with success in the minds of

Beijing’s leaders, who then projected it into Korean War in their strategic thinking and decision making. Mao himself showed this mindset repeatedly in his telegrams to Marshal Peng during the course of the war. The reality of international politics in the cold war period, however, militated against the feasibility of this mindset. Even if Communist China’s forces had been so lucky or maybe so powerful as to annihilate some American divisions and eventually drive UN forces out of Korean Peninsula, a frustrated Washington would likely not to give in but instead continue to contain Communist China with more determined actions. It may or may not have initiated a new world war by attacking mainland China and the Soviet Union, but one thing seems quite certain: Washington would likely have tightened up the diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions against the PRC, because these diplomatic levers were much cheaper and easier to mobilize than any costly military intervention. This “military defeat followed by diplomatic offensive” model could be clearly illustrated in Washington’s post-Vietnam war policy on the new unified Communist Vietnamese regime. That policy featured economic sanction and diplomatic non-recognition, which lasted 20 years until 1995 in President Clinton’s administration. If the Beijing leadership had had some familiarity with this model of crisis

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management of Washington, then they may have realized that the chance of success of their foreign policy, rooted as it was in their confidence that all problems could be solved through military might, was quite low. Instead, the Communist leader might have adopted a more flexible foreign policy in their conduct of UN diplomacy.

The lack of diplomatic leverage made it more difficult for Beijing to counter

Washington’s diplomatic offensive in early 1951. Up to that point, the PRC regime had only gained diplomatic recognition from seventeen countries, many of them not member states of

United Nations yet, such as East Germany, North Korea, Mongolia, and Albania. In addition, some of those countries that had recognized the PRC, such particularly Britain, could not be depended on to support Beijing’s UN diplomacy. China’s new leaders had never paid any official visits to any of these states other than to the Soviet Union, nor had the new Chinese government signed any economic, cultural exchange or cooperation or any other agreements of that nature with those countries. So the links of PRC with the outside world were still weak and fragile. Furthermore, most of the 60 member states of the UN in 1950 maintained diplomatic relations with Nationalist China on Taiwan and few of them had any clear understanding of the

PRC’s “peace diplomacy” with the neutral states. To them, the fear of Communism was more real than any goodwill or Communist propaganda appeals to “national liberation from Western imperialism” such as those which featured so prominently in General Wu’s speech. Therefore, in this indifferent if not hostile international environment, Beijing’s blackmailing approach toward cease-fire and peace negotiation stood little chance of success. If Beijing’s military gamble failed, which turned out to be case, the consequence of such reckless diplomacy would be catastrophic, which also turned to be the case with passage of the aggressor resolution and imposition of economic sanctions on PRC. Opportunists are preoccupied with how to take

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advantage of circumstances with little respect of any commonly held principles, and with little respect of the interests of others. On the other hand, any effective diplomacy requires to some extent the respect of the interests of other parties in the process. The bargaining process in any effective negotiation should be a process of give-and-take, in which compromises and concessions are expected from all parties, in order to reach an agreement upon a course of action in which the interests of all parties can be better protected or advanced. In this regard, Beijing’s adventurism in foreign policy fell into an unsolvable contradiction with most members of UN in the issue of cease-fire arrangement. The Communist “negotiation first, cease-fire second” formula was very unpopular in the UN because it provided no promise to end the conflict in the immediate future, a conflict into which many member states of UN had either sent troops or provided other types of support, which gave them a strong interest in seeing an immediate cease- fire in order to prevent any escalation. In spite of Zhou’s explanations, the PRC’s approach was widely perceived as a form of blackmail in which the CCP was attempting use force to impose its will on the majority of the UN members. The pre-conditions attached to the cease fire proposals as well as the arrogance of Zhou’s replies had deeply insulted UN community.

Therefore, unless Communist military operations achieved decisive victory in the battlefield, there was little possibility that such plan would be accepted by UN, even after that, it was still highly doubtful that PRC’s political demands with regard to the UN seat, Korea, and Taiwan would be met because even then the “capitalist world” might still have plenty of resources and human power to resist the Communists. Although it is impossible to predict exactly what would have happened if the Communist military had gained steady success in Korea, one thing is quite certain: the scenario in Korea and the UN would definitely not be a repetition of what happened in China’s civil war in 1949.

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The PRC’s diplomacy in this period could be summarized as “adventurism first, and then defeatism,” and its attitude as “arrogance first, and then humbleness.” The changeover took place in May 1951, when the Communist forces’ Fifth Campaign failed to achieve its goals and their retreat turned into a disaster. From November 1950 to May 1951, if Beijing had allowed

Wu’s mission to continue to stay in New York to function as a direct channel between Beijing and Washington and to deal with the international community in order to help dissolve the widespread suspicion and fear of PRC, if Zhou had provided a more realistic and practical response and counter-proposals to the UN offers rather than arrogant reiterations of his rigid, non-negotiable pre-conditioned cease-fire approach, if PRC’s foreign service apparatus showed more maturity in providing more professional advice and suggestions to its political leaders to the spirit of military adventurism from trespassing into the sphere of foreign policy, then this adventurism might have been avoided so that the PRC’s national interests could be better served or at least, the impact of such reckless of foreign policy could have been trimmed down to a bearable degree. For instance, Beijing might have maintained better relations with many neutral states, and it might not have stepped into the trap set by Washington in condemning PRC as the aggressor of Korean War, or the Trade Sanction Resolution on the PRC in May 1951would have had less chance of gaining passage.

After mid-May 1951, the adventurism of Beijing’s foreign policy suddenly fell into a kind of defeatism, which featured the total loss of confidence of its diplomatic victory, and the full withdrawal of its cease-fire pre-conditions. Overwhelmed by the deteriorating military situation, and by its newly inflated estimate of the strengths and strategic goals of the UN forces,

Beijing suddenly panicked, was desperate for a cease-fire, and even promised to drop all pre- conditions which were the core of all of its previous dealings with UN. In hindsight, it is

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worthwhile to give a brief review of the necessity of this dramatic policy change in order to gain

a more thorough understanding of the mentality and strategic thinking of Communist China’s

foreign policy decision makers. First, the lack of enough intelligence and knowledge of the

adversaries, and about the US in particular had become a serious obstacle in the decision making

process of Beijing’s leaders. Without a well-informed understanding of its adversaries, Beijing’s foreign policy became unstable, or at worst, became a victim of subjectivism. This knowledge

gap was especially true in Beijing’s overestimate of the US’s military power (such as the chance

of an amphibious landing, the stop lines of UN offensives, its ambition to drive CPV out of

Korea) and its failure to pay enough attention to Washington’s “limited war” concept, which had

been appearing frequently in White House’s press releases and news papers articles. Second,

Beijing failed to pay enough attention to the weight of the Soviet factor in Washington’s global

strategic thinking. Beijing’s leaders seemed to pay inadequate attention to the fact even though

the US may have had enough power to defeat Communist China in Korea (whether or not it had

such capability is questionable, let alone to invade China directly), the need to safeguard

Western Europe (Washington’s top strategic focus) from possible Soviet invasion alone was

intense enough to cripple any attempt on Washington’s part to mobilize for an all-out Far East

War.

On the contrary, Beijing inflated the value of China theatre in Washington’s global strategy, and hence it felt much more threatened by Washington’s possible offensive than was actually warranted. This sense of threat culminated in early June when the UN military counteroffensive seemed unstoppable, and it eventually led to the sudden collapse of Communist confidence both militarily and diplomatically. If Beijing had had better intelligence collection

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and analysis service, and a better knowledge of Washington’s global strategy thinking, the defeatist behaviors and concessions in June and July 1951 might have been avoided.

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